Ragesh in Full Throttle!

Comedy questions! December 4, 2006

Now, I have seen lots of things that have irritated and infuriated me. But, topping the list are some comedy questions that I have encountered during exams, throughout the 16 years that I have been a student, questions which as I see, have no point. Mostly, they give me a laugh.

Some of my favourites(??!!) are:

1. In Std 10th C.B.S.E Board Examination, the very 1st question in Science was something like “How many hours does a radio have to run to consume 1KWh of energy?”. Oh, for crying out loud! what does that mean?, I mean without specifying the power rating, how can I answer that? There are radios of different power ratings. The comedy here is that there was a line in the text that said, “A radio will take about 8 hours to consume 1KWh of energy.” Now, that was a casual statement assuming the radio to have a power rating of 125W. It is like asking, “What is 4+ ?” Oh, it was eneasy to receive that question first up, kind of like a bad omen, but I scored 97% in Science, and so no more omens.

2. Questions that ask us to draw the “architecture” of something. Now, what does that mean? I am an avid artist(painter) but come on, drawing boxes and drawing lines between them. What do we learn from those diagrams? Now, as I have seen, most of them are too complicated to comprehend or too clumsy to give you any idea. More often than not, they don’t make us understand how a system works. It is just a way of mockery of both artists and logical thinking ablility of the students.

3. This is the best! “Frame/Header Formats”. Come on, give me a break!. What do I learn by learning the frame formats by heart and reproducing in the exams. They may be just read through, but expecting us to memorise it. draw boxes that look like trains, split them into boogies, etc .lol. Because it is a specification, and it will be available in any hand book. Everytime I see one of these “frame format” thingies, I go like, “Oh no, not again!”, another 10 min wasted..

4. Questions that are supoosed to be “programmatic” and I look at them with a glow in my eyes, only to find more comedy like “Write the methods of “so and so” class”. Draw the “architecture” of “so and so programming language”. Ah! what a mockery of the intelligence, analytical skills and ablility of a programmer. It is like asking Michael Schumacher to draw the layout of his car using “boxes” rather than drive it as his best to win a race.

Well, I am not undermining the importance of raw theory, but the application part should be given enough emphasis. Thankfully, today in Web Technology exam, there were some application oriented (programmatic) questions.

After all, the purpose of education is to make us think, not to recall, to innovate and not to reproduce. Only then, we will be doing what we call Learning.