While it’s well know that BITS Pilani has no mandatory attendance, not a lot of folks know that Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur also doesn’t mandate attendance.
This is the story of the only course I never attended in my four years of IIT Kanpur and how the professor tried to bribe the students to attend classes.
The most dreaded class that you could sign up for is the 8am class in the winters.
Winter temperatures in IIT Kanpur range in 1-5 degrees - a fact that we realized post-hoc due to the lack of curiosity and modern day smart phones. But what was nerve wracking is that you had no recourse to heaters.
And if you’re wondering why we did not have recourse to heaters? Well, because the hostel most seniors get are ‘old’ as they have more ‘legacy’. And with great legacy comes prehistoric wiring which cannot withstand the power demand of more than 10 heaters. In a classic tragedy of commons, if more than 10 people use heaters, the entire hostel’s electricity would blow out.
We battled the cold, the old fashioned way. 4 blankets, 3 trousers, 3 socks, a monkey cap.
So, getting students to wake up at 8am is a professor’s worst nightmare. Now couple that with a class of 500 students on Probability.
The session in January started with the usual enthusiasm with a turnout of over 100%. You would expect that everyone would get a hand of probability because you read that in JEE. But by week 3 most students were either lost or were not attending the classes. Attendance fell by atleast 50% (or so I think because I was one of those who did not dare leave his bed). Just a few weeks before mid-term, a pittance of 20 students were attending classes.
Most professors would not bat an eyelid, after all, a professors primary job is not teaching.
But every once in a while professors want to have some fun. So one fine day in February he decided to mandate 10% of marks for attendance.
For those of you who haven’t attended classes with relative grading. 10% is the difference between an ‘A’ grade and a ‘C’ grade, or in some cases the line between flunking a course and comfortably passing one.
And the ‘cherry on top’? It was a random roll-call, which essentially was a class on probability in a class on probability. With 500 students and 40 classes left you can do the math about what your probability for being roll called on a particular day can be.
This had the intended effect, the classes were packed post the mid-sems.
I’m sure you’re wondering what happened to me? Didn’t I mention that I did not attend any of the classes for this particular course?
Well, I only spoke a half-truth. Yes, I did not attend any class till the very last day because not only did I hate the cold more than the upside of 10% marks, but because my name was never called. Which meant that I rushed on the final day just before the final class to get my name marked and managed to those precious 10% marks.
Despite those 10% marks, this was my Scarlett letter in my gradesheet.