Professors do need to permute the tests so that people won't just look up last year's final. But permuting them once a year is a very different proposition than permuting them an endless number of times as students demand to retake the test.

There will always be cheaters. That's why companies, as part of the interview process, ask basic knowledge questions. It weeds out a lot of the cheaters and frauds. I hear people all the time desperately try to justify cheating. I don't care if people cheat, but I wouldn't hire any of them, and I doubt many employers would.

Sure, there'll always be bad tests and bad teachers. If one could be "taught to the test" then it's a bad test. It can certainly be true that one could pass the test and yet fail to understand the material, but I'm not convinced that people can master the material yet flunk the test.

But testing, in general, works. For me, I know that the pressure of final exams would motivate me to learn the material. No pressure, no learning.

40 years after I graduated, I'd surely flunk every final if I retook them cold today. I just finished taking the MIT 18.01 calculus class online. I was surprised at how easily the stuff came flooding back into my head. It's still there, I just had to chip the rust off :-)