A students response to finals: Answer, hope and move on; Ive got a lot more to cram before the next test. At their worst, assessments are seen by students as a barrier to advancement and used by faculty as a perfunctory rite of passage at the end of a course of instruction. Making assessments more meaningful is to appreciate what they are not; they are not predictive of future performance, they do not add joy to the process of discovery and they are not a dynamic that strengthens the collegial bond among students or between students and faculty. One may ask, then, what is the purpose of assessing students?