The Exam Rant...

I ask you this... when in life, apart from education, will it be vitally important that we can sit on an uncomfortable chair in front of a desk so tiny your pencil case keeps falling off, in silence, and have to rememeber everything you need to know about the sedimentary rocks (for instance)?
Not to mention your under so much stress the only thing you can remember is the date of the battle of Hastings, and thats not even on your course.
I mean what possible use is an exam in life, it only gives you a piece of paper with a mark on it wich is supposed to represent how clever you are. Which probably isn't a good judgement anyway - I have known Incredibly intelligent people, I'm talking A* grades here people, who in the when faced with an exam will crumble under pressure and end up leaving half the questions out.
Okay so it says that this person knows everyhting there is to know about the Napoleonic Wars, well the things on this particular course anyway. Not to metion after countless weeks of revising every fact in thier notebooks untill they can remember nothing else. The thing is, straight after the exam they forget it all. Give the person the same exam five years later and they will probably get nowhere near they're original mark.
I mean how bigger life skill is being able to revise? You can't revise for things all the way through life can you?
Say your mountain climbing and you need to find out the pressure of your oxygen tank based on the temperature, it was a simple eqaision you learnt at school. You can't run around screaming "OH MY GOD I DIDN'T REVISE!".

Not to mention all the pressure and stress your under, a simple question such as "whats 7 multiplied by 8" wich you could easily work out without a caculator in real life - in exam conditions can seem like atomic science
Besides, surely with the research possibilities of the internet and even encyclopedias wich have been around for ages and ages, why do we need to be able to recite facts like the properties of titanium at will when we could look it up in two minutes?