What are the exams for?

What are the exams for?

(short essay)

"Exams motivate students to study harder."

You can hear this from many teachers, adults, parents and other people. In my opinion that people are very closeminded, cause they don’t understand, that the time is changing. I think that exams are a waste of time. They don’t make us study harder, but they take all our energy and time, so we can’t study anything else. We have to learn by heart all our lessons just to pass exams, but after the exams, we just forget everything and realize that we didn’t learn everything at school. People want us to know everything, to be good at maths, languages, history, and many other classes, but nobody’s perfect.
I don’t find it good, that at first, we learn something for our 4th-grade exams, then we start learning for exams in 9th grade, and e.t.c. Life is not only exams, people just don’t understand that.

However sometimes exams are necessary for us to evaluate our knowledge, and improve ourselves. But I think they should be only in universities, but not in school, because universities just choose their students, and exams can help at this point. Anyway I hope that someday people will understand, that we don’t need exams anymore, and will find a more interesting way to test students knowledge, if that’s necessary.