One day, I was studying for one of my exams, and this thought came to my mind – Why do colleges keep the minimum required attendance level so high? The first answer that comes to anyone’s mind is: Because students bunk classes.

Okay, but why do students bunk classes?

The reason is simple: Because the lectures are boring. The hard fact is, very few people take up teaching out of dedication. Most of the people are those who for some reasons, could not get a job in their industry and are in the teaching job.

My college specifies a minimum attendance requirement of 75%. And this is almost same across major colleges in India. I don’t know what’s the case in IITs, NITs, etc. I have a few friends from those but nobody ever complained about attendance.

Continue reading “The Minimum Attendance Requirement” →

1. University created a form generator for generating the examination form. A friend of mine, in Third Year computer engineering with me, tells me to come with him to the lab to complete the form… because he doesn’t know how to do it! WTF!? A student of Third Year Computer Engineering doesn’t know how to complete an online form?
2. Another friend of mine, is friends with a second year student. The second year student wants programs/notes/etc. So my friend asks me to send him that because I had them. The complete archive is on Dropbox. I told the second year guy to just put the link I’m texting him in the browser’s address bar and download the file. My friend has suspects that he won’t be able to do it (he isn’t much of a basic techno person either). And that’s what happened. My friend has asked me now to e-mail that giant archive.

And that’s the type of computer engineering students in my college.

It’s semester end again at college and we’ve got hell lots of journal-writing work. The journal-writing work is a indespsible part of every semester in Engineering, at least in my University and possibly every other University out there.

The general trend in my college, a lot different from others is – A student (usually the topper) is given the format and sample by the professors. They are then instructed to write it (we do it by hand, unfortunately), distribute their copies to friends, and the chain goes on. So basically, every student has the same journal, differing by some extent due to unavoidable errors that creep in the copy-chain and laziness.

The job of writing journals isn’t very hard that one cannot write it by using their brain, but it is a very boring task to do. Hence everyone (that includes me) refers to be somewhere in the middle of the copy chain, and never in the front. Everyone mindlessly copies the things without even thinking what they are writing in their journals – this means they even copy nonsense. But there’s one thing for sure – nobody would try (exceptions do exist, and they are of the order of 0.01%) to even understand or alter the code which was originally written.

Continue reading “The Flawed Evaluation System” →