Course sweet course

Out of the many courses that a CS student in IITB can choose, the one that stands out is CS*** (let's keep this a suspense). This is a course that is tailor made for those students who wants to spent their academic semester on anything but academics. Obviously I too have credited this course. Now the natural question that anyone will ask is why is this course so attractive for lazy bones like me? Well, for that, one first needs to understand IITB :-


"It is not the IITB that one learns from books and parents"

"It is the IITB of boys who have to fight with 1000 other guys to win over 50 odd girls"

"It is the IITB of students who have taken a pledge to start their assignment work only when one day is left for it's submission"

"It is the IITB of Boroles and Kashyaps whose technical conversation makes you wish you were dead"

"It is the IITB of students who burn the midnight oil only to get screwed up in the exam the next day"

An outsider will never understand what this means. For that, one needs
the sense, the sensibility and the sensitivity of an IITBian.

(Now some people may say that the above lines are similar to some dialogues in a mallu movie. Just ignore them).

Sorry, got a little emotional there. So where were we? Oh yeah, why is this course so attractive. Well it is attractive because unlike  other courses where you do all the assignments, quizzes, mid sems,end sems, project and still manage to get the worst possible grade, the same can be done in this course without much effort. The glamour quotient of this course can be gauged from the fact that in comparison to other courses where the average count of students who have credited the course is around 20-30, this course is credited by around 100+ students. So you see, I am not the only lazy guy in here.

This is the only course in whole of IITB where students come atleast half an hour before the class. This is not for the love of the subject, but for great demand for the last benches. There is a quiz in every class and the total weightage for the class quizzes is so high that even if we give the end sem exams a miss (btw no mid sems for this course), we can scrap through with a pass grade (passing is the only criterion for the final year students like me).

Now most of us belong to the elite category of students who have no idea what is being taught in class. There are just a few among us who are outside this category. The whole burden of making sure all the elite students pass this course, rests on these few students. It is such a huge responsibility that these guys have to take the hard way - study and come prepared to the class. As for the elite students, each of us has a definite style of finding out the right answer.

Let's take the examples of the bengali brothers Dodo* and Munna*. For Dodo to pass the course, the only thing he needs to do is make sure he comes early to class, and reserve 2 seats - one for himself and one for Munna  and make sure that no one but Munna occupies that seat. Dodo is very protective of the seat meant for Munna, like a lioness protecting her cubs. Anyone coming near to that seat will have to face Dodo's wrath. After all Dodo's dream of passing out from IIT depends on how comfortable Munna is while writing the quiz.

*(names changed considering the terrorist threats faced by them)

Some people put their machine learning knowledge to good use. They first look at the guy sitting to their right, then to their left, then front and then back. After the "data" is compiled from all sides, machine learning techniques are applied on these data to come up with the answer which, they think, will be the most probabilistic answer. So effective is their approach that Prof Soumen and Prof Sunita would have had tears in their eyes knowing how much their students had learned from them.

Others, who are not equipped with such highly sophisticated weapons like data mining, will simply look at the guy on the right and then on the left and then take the arithmetic  mean. Thus if the guy on the left has written an 'A' and the one on the right has written a 'C', then the answer, according to him, will be 'B'. 

The only limitation of this course is what to do for the rest 1 hour 25 minutes, once the 5 minute quiz is over. Well, considering the brilliant innovative stuff that IITians are made of, we overcome this limitation by doing what we know best - sleep.

Thus this is one of those rare courses in IIT where we can end up getting good grades as well as good sleep by making sure we follow what bible has adviced us to do -  "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"