Tuesday, April 29, 2008

If Well Begun Is Half Done...

Genre: Blabber

As far as exams go, this was as dramatic a start as one can ever think of.

It all started with the moment we got our question papers- for probably the first time in history of engineering exams, we had open ended 'Complete The Following' type of questions (similar to the ones found in language and Social Sciences papers of Std IX)!

One of the questions that had all of us in a fix went like this-

Piston Attenuator is ___________.
(Stumped? We all were! After all it was for the first time we all were hearing the word 'Piston Attenuator', leave aside knowing what the heck it is!)

As a result, we got to see some really creative answers, some of them highly interesting like these-

Piston Attenuator is a type of attenuator. (Oh really?)

Piston Attenuator is used in many applications. (If not, why would it exist?)

Piston Attenuator is used in cars (Piston.. cars.. sounds fitting)

Piston Attenuator is bad. (This one takes the cake!)

Adding to the chaos was the fact that for supervision, we had in our class The Great Billas- known all over for his amazing command over the English language- it is a little known fact that this gentleman has inspired many a film comedians from Javed Jaffery in Salaam Namaste to Anil Kapoor in Tashan; he shot to overnight fame in our college (and neighbouring ones too) with his "Once Gones The Gones" -an ingenious translation of the Hindi phrase "Ek baar jo gaya so gaya". Coming back to today- When some enterprising students told him that the question paper has some out of syllabus questions, he shot back-

"After over the paper complain that."

As if this was not enough, just as we managed to scrap through the 'Complete The Following' questions, a bigger shock awaited us- a question asked us to 'explain how to produce coloured patterns' (why dont they ask this at Asian Paints factory instead)- now anything remotely related to coloured patterns that we have heard of is in the subject called Communication Systems- a paper scheduled for next Monday, not today.

By this time the subject teacher was here and one student, who, just to vent out his frustration, asked tounge-in-cheek whether we could write about the colour pattern generation from Communication Systems subject, got the shock of his life when the teacher replied "Kuch bhi likho, chalega!". (By the way this is the same teacher who gave me marks for all 4 questions in the 'Attempt any 3 out of 4 questions' type Mid Semester test a couple of months back, resulting in me getting a cool 30 on 30- or should I call it 30 on 40! But that's a different matter altogether.)

More surprises were in store- as we went upto Q 4b, which was a numerical problem- after some tedious calculations we arrived at a value of the asked capacitance as -712.5! Eureka! We discovered Negative Capacitance!! Wait- before you think of sending me the Chemistry Nobel Prize for 2008, this discovery as of now exists only on our answer sheets! (For the non-scientific minded souls- capacitance is a measure oif a physical quantity just like weight, volume etc and hence it is always a positive value.)

Again, when this was brought to the notice of the teacher who set the paper (by now it was obvious what we always doubted- that she sets the paper by randomly opening any page of the book and the topic fist seen is put in the question paper- and probably while checking allots marks by throwing a pair of dice and noting the value appearing on its top faces!), she nonchalantly replied- "if its negative, let it remain negative. Don't worry." Ahem!

By the end of it, I just felt like asking the teacher- "kya aap paanchvi paas se tez hai?"

PS: I hope nobody from Times Of India is reading this, else this will appear tomorrow on the front page going by the enthusiasm that these people have in maligning the reputation of my college in whatsoever ways possible.

PPS: "After over the paper complain that." in Normal English means "After the paper gets over, complain about that."

BREAKING NEWS: It has emerged that the subject teacher had outsourced the task of setting up the paper in question to a professor famously (or, infamously) known as RaPa. This explains the flustered look on her face on seeing the question paper herself!

10 comments:

  1. I would have loved to be a Times Of India journo at this moment-;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Karan it was an excellent chance for u to top in this paper coz u could have given the best answer for the piston attenuator question....its used in the WAP-4,5,7 and WCAMs etc[seriously i dunno whether its used or not-;)]and the teacher would hv had to confirm it from CLW and BHEL for the answer...lol....u could have again got some xtraaa marks from ur teacher...though she would not have understood a thing on wat u wrote-:)

    ReplyDelete
  3. hey there well written..
    seems u guys had d same condition wich we comps ppl had during our CG MST! the questions u got sound more like from a mechie paper rathr than tronix! neways who's a poor old comps slogger like me to know...;)

    chal keep posting more exciting experiences.. hey not that i wnat every paper of urs to be "unfortunately eventful" haan! :) may god bless u wid boring uneventful papers jisme tereko sabbbbb kuchhhhhhh aye! bas khush??

    ReplyDelete
  4. @ Abhishek

    Damn, I should have done something like that- writing technical stuff that the teacher would never comprehend! (she cannot comprehend even basic stuff from her subject is a different matter).

    @ Jagged Edge

    I did not know it was YOU till I saw your display pic ;-)
    And infact I would prefer more eventful papers as long as they stump everyone, not just me (relative grading, after all!) rather than uninteresting boring papers!

    ReplyDelete
  5. heya karan,seems like u havin a ball writin da papers.lol
    well dude,enjoy da entertainment till it lasts..coz
    ONCE THE GONES THE GONES!

    ReplyDelete
  6. piston attenuator is...BAD???? huh??? *bewildered look*

    thats crazier than leaving the CG paer blank with out of syllabus written against each question no.....

    *on a serious note....cool post...*

    ReplyDelete
  7. in UDCT across the street we have a lecturer called Dr.rathod.
    here are some of his gems:

    1.Once while taking attendance name of guy who had left the course came up. when ppl in class shouted left this fellow looked at left trying to find the guy.

    2.he once tried to rub a power point Projection by hand.

    3.once he was explaining the experiment of finned tube heat exchanger to a girl. He was telling about the heat transfer from a hot body through radiation,when he said to her ,"this is your body, it is very hot".

    ReplyDelete
  8. @Akshay

    Great! So we have competition!

    Like your Dr. Rathod we also had a prof who once said "All those who are absent, please raise your hands!"

    PS: Btw, does this Rathod look like a perpetually drunk middle-aged man? Even we have a Rathod and maybe he teaches you guys too!

    ReplyDelete
  9. here is the guy.
    http://www.udct.org/departments/ce/vkr/fp.html
    he wont be teaching you mostly as he hardly knows chemical engineering and no chance of him knowing anything else.

    We have variety of professors you wont believe from profs who did there ms from mit to professors who spit while talking(main hoo na type) also one prof called V. V. mahajani
    (http://www.udct.org/departments/ce/vvm/fp.html) rolls dice to select student who will show homework as he believes if he randomly selects, girls may lodge sexual harassment case against him.

    ReplyDelete
  10. oh just to add rathod is quite young got married few months back though he surely drinks.

    ReplyDelete

Creative Commons License
My World...My Views by The Blue Indian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.