Professors has completely autonomy over their courses at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and boy o boy, did it translate to some really fun and innovating grading schemes.
Professor TV Prabhakar (or Professor TVP) is probably of the coolest professor that I can recall from my days of college. I’ve already written about the time when he cancelled a class on account of it being April’s fool and gave us a chai party instead.
But this is the story of the first time we met him.
Traditionally, the first class of any course at IIT Kanpur is an overview of the course to set expectations. The professor will talk about how they intend to structure the credits of the course, the niti-grities of grading, lecture splits, workshops, practical and theory. Incidentally this is also the class with probably the most attendance as the ‘ethu’ is high during the start of the semester and wanes with students getting back into the rhythm of college life.
A lot of professors over the course have had interesting takes on the grading system and I’ve countless stories to share from open book exams, to semi-infinite time boxed exams (this was an interesting one), but Professor TVP threw what can be called as a ‘googly’.
Grading is an exercise in game theory. Most professors want to optimize for classes attended, effort or maybe even learning, but Professor TVP had wilder plans.
And hence on the very first day of class - just like Morpheus in Matrix did - presented all the students with a
choice.
You could chose the blue pill - where you continue with the course as usual - tests, mid-terms, end-iterms, classes et al.
Or you could choose the red pill - don’t attend any single class and instead build out an interesting project on which you will be graded. A project which could eventually stand on it’s own legs like any good startup.
A few students did choose the latter, but for the rest of us not only did he make us take tests, mid-terms, end-terms. But also he got us to do a project at a smaller scale.
Talk about having the cake and eating the cherry too.