Run...it's the quiz

Once every month or so, the institute management suddenly hits upon the bright (har har) idea to pain the poor unsuspecting students with what is called a quiz. In the general sense, a quiz is a fun event of questioning and answering, with a healthy sense of competition among the students. In IIT, a quiz is a not-so-fun group of question with generally obscure or no answers aimed at destroying the fun in our lives and bringing about strife in the student community. For at around this time arises a uniquely IITian phenomenon called the rg.

Relative Grading, fondly abbreviated as rg is an integral part of IIT life. What theoretically happens is that profs grade all papers and rank them and in some hyper-shady way, mark a paper as S,A,B,C,D,E or the dreaded cup, U, in decreasing order of ranking and increasing order of probability. What actually happens is that a guy from a village (not even the prof, just a lousy TA) draws up a statistical chart of all the names of the students and plots a probabilty distribution of how far the individual's hometown is from his village and grades them as S,B or U accordingly.

Whatever the system is, I am not gonna complain. Even if the TA were from the heart of Chennai my spectacular performances will always assure me a D. What really chafes though is the fact that the students take this tomfoolery to heart. Friends in IIT are friends for life, except 48 hours before any quiz. They will mug in secret, feign ignorance and even lie to ensure that you dont "rg"them. And the only consolation that you get when the other guy gets an S in that you can give him the most thorough bums* ever. I am proud to say I have not recieved a bums on that count yet.

Another phenomena that arises around the quiz-time is the "give-up". This breed of creature is generally seen fagging or boozing around quiz-times to get his mind off things. And he really succeeds in clearing his mind of absolutely everything, as is obvious by his marks.

Finally, the concept of the "night-out". The IIT-ian is really a busy creature. He has to crash(sleep), fart(chat), play counterstrike, play counterstrike, play counterstrike and play counterstrike. So rarely gets time for trivial matters like classes or mugging. This climaxes with an all-night frenzy on the night before the quiz to cram in most of what the professor might have let slip in the whole semester, using borrowed notes and texts. Someone memorably said, in IIT we dont learn engineering, we learn to learn...

Do we? Am I missing something here?


*bums- A primitive form of punishment meted out to rg-ers and birthday boys. One hefty guy holds onto his arms, one to his legs and around forty guys take turns kicking his fleshy rearside to pulp. I am told the victim is unable to perform regular duties for days after the punishment.