Is the Faculty accountable for anything??

Back to blogging after a long time. Unfortunatley the events that have compelled me to write this blog were actually really avoidable.

Some of the faculty members in the institute are the finest academicians around. But when it comes to administration i find a lot of things hard to digest. IIIT has lots of vague rules(attendence, PT, Jeevan vidya....) Most of these rules were implemented without giving any importance to student opinion. But somehow the students accepted all this. But there are some things that i find hard to understand.....things that show a lack of transparency on the part of the faculty....

1. The first "instance" of this high handedness were the last elections held in the campus. The election reuslts were nullified without any valid explanation. Effectively the faculty disregarded our votes.

2.Allotment of computers is a touchy issue right now. Institute claims that there is a 2:1 student computer ratio. I can count and that ratio is wrong. We pay about 3~3.5 lakhs as fee for the b.Tech course. A resonable PC would cost u about 25K. That is not even 10% of our fees. And our labcom was informed by the server room people that even though there is a shortage of infrastructure there would be no new purchases. No wonder all surveys by magazines say the college has poor infrastructure.


3. The sysadmins...... I have absolutely no frigging idea about why,when and who came up with the brilliant idea of getting rid of student admins. The new guys suck and end up asking nirnimesh to do their trouble shoting. This is more then anything shameful for a place like IIIT which has a decent number of people capable of doing he job.

4.FSIS... I have been to a reasonable number of FSIS/SFIS sessions and i swear i have never seen a greater wastage of time. I dont remember a single FSIS where any Popular descision has been announced. it's more of a press confrence by the faculty to announce the new ideas they are going to implement. And to anybody who says "nobody turns up for FSIS".... nobody is interested to attend a session where descisions are announced and the discussions are merely a formality.

5.Ragging.....Some people from UG2 and UG3 were implicated by a DIS-committee. I think each and every word of the discussions that went on behind those closed doors should be made public. And i mean everything right from the students statements to the questions asked by the faculty. If the DIS-CO investigated everything in a Impartial and dignified manner i see no reason why things should not be made public....unless the faculty has something to hide.

The thing is i'm not saying the faculty is right/wrong. The point I am trying to make is that when descisions that affect the entire student community are taken things should be transparent so that we know why the descision is being taken. I'm sure by working in the open the faculty can form a much better relationship with the students.


PS 1. No wonder the govt tried to ban blogs. People like us use them to flame everybody .... :D
PS2. I hope I get a new room I'm still stuk on the 3rd floor :((
PS3.New mess OBH gf is reasonably good. hope it continues that way.

Summer Holidays....the first month in review

1. Long time since i wrote my last post. It was during the exams and was more of a stress buster. That contained a lot of "I will do this , I will do that" kind of sentiment.

2. My project is getting my a$$ kicked. Kannan keeps handing me papers to read. It takes a week to get the background of the paper and why the damn paper was even written. I seriously question the wisdom of forcing incapable/uninterested people to do research :(


3.Arsenal Vs. Barcelona. Arsenal has a lot of money riding on this match. Victory here could be worth upto 30 million pounds to Arsenal (prize money for this year+participation in next years competition.) So guess they just cant afford to lose.Hope boro can land the UEFA cup.

4.I had mentioned in the previous post that i had managed to get a deal for a HP laptop. That deal got cancelled. I got something better :D
Dell inspiron 1705 Dual core processor 1.8 Ghz,1 GB RAM, 80 GB 7200 RPM SATA, Ge Force 7800GT with 256MB Video memory(dedicated mem no shitty turboCache), Sound blaster xi-fi,DVD writer,tv-tuner,17" tft widescreen with a refresh rate of 85 hz. This was all purchased for an indian equivalent of 57K.

I will get the laptop sometime in july. This is one gaming monster. It had a 3dMark 05 score of nearly 5000(5031 to be exact got 5879 with overclocking). To give you an idea of how good that is...A PC with the following config ....
AMD 2800+ (64 bit),512 MB ram,160 gb sata,radeon 9800 pro(not overclocked) has a score of 2100(This was rathi's PC when he had his 9800). It might seem like I am unnecessarily bragging. But i am excited to death to get such a laptop. I wonder how much the best pc's in CVIT would score?

5. I tried to sell my room PC to raise some cash. config is...
AMD 2800+(64 bit),512 mb ram,80 gb sata,17" monitor,16x DVD writer,tv-tuner,nvidia 5200 with 256 MB VRAM. plus the usual stuff.....Some person(i will not name him for his sake) wanted to buy this PC for 12K. Now, are people ignorant or are they just idiots? After seeing nobody was willing to offer even 20k i decided not to sell the pc. It will just be sent home. Getting such a PC for the price i was asking(25k) seems pretty reasonable. Dumb people.

6.Rooney broke his foot,Totti his ankle,Cafu his knee,Ronaldo doubtful,Owen unfit, Raul stupid, all the important people are screwed. World cup ki maa ki....

7.It's sooooooooooo humid this summer. This is baaaaaaaaaad. I have been in hyderbad for 15 years now and it has never been so humid in the summer.

8.Pramod Mahajan died. Sad. He was a good leader. I think the whole episode was stupid. He died, his brother will surely get life in prison or the death penalty. two lives wasted without reason.

9.My Heartfelt sympathies to the ECE people. They are getting some pretty bad grading. I know the faculty may read this part of the post someday but, Both the director and the guy who took the course(i think it's some ADC or DSP course) should get a kick on their a$$. The guy who took the course deserves a kick for doing such stupid grading and the director for not protecting the interests of his students by not fixing these dumb grades. Dean is a non-existant player(why should we pay for his salary if he is of no use?). Have no idea what is going on. Not giving A grades in a relative grading system is technically wrong. There must be a topper who must get an A grade. As apocalypse wrote in one of his posts the facluty doesn't follow any rules when it comes to grading. Very bad on the part of the faculty members.

Post Exam musings

1.Exams finally over gfx lab left

2.Very Very hot on the 3rd floor esp during the afternoon

3.DVD writer not working :( driver is corrupted (wonder how that happend?)

4.Got algos paper today. have a grand total of about 60. Going to get a B- :((

5.Waiting for the next India-Eng match. can't remember india thrashing 3 teams in a row like this

6.Dad agreed to but me a laptop. Now i have to wait for some relative/friend to come to india and give it. But it's a cool laptop from Hp. Intel Dual core 1.8ghz,1gb ram, nvidia7400 256mb,80gb sata,16x dvd writer,17" tft with side lamps,tv tuner :D,creative audigy4. All this for $1300=60K=awesome deal

7.Having nightmares with the agrids lab server. The damn thing just wont work with linux. Open invitation to all those champions of linux to make it work :P

8.my cell phone is on it's death bed. (dont worry it's a moto c131 yuck....) Will get a new phone by next sem

9.looking forward to the summer. Have a cool project with kannan and kamal guiding me. Will have a lotta work but then it's not everday that u get to work on things u want to work on. Also got the world cup coming up. But somehow the world cup doesn't quite appeal to me. Prefer the champions league. coz the overall quality is better.

10.Finished with The OC. have watched till 320. waiting for more episodes. Also would like to thank Firefox(manan from ug2) for his dedication to dloading stuff. U rock firefox.

11.Finally the sem is over. It has been a horrible sem becoz of the workload. But i also made my blogging debut this sem and intend to put up a last post on 12th.

Counter Halley post

About 2-3 months ago Halley wrote a pretty long and debate triggering post about the state d'affairs in IIIT. He raised more hell then good points in my opinion. I thought of writing a counter view to each issue raised. But Nirnimesh already did it. But recently Halley rewrote the whole thing(i found it only now !) so i decided to write a counter blog instead of counter comments.

1.Research: Do you expect miracles in research from UG students? The "research" work we do here is like a small taste of what research is like. It's like a "Intro to reserach" course or something. I have read people saying that honors and MSBR are useless. Well own their own they are but that's not what these things are meant for. They are supposed to put you on the track to research. And there is a limit to the amount of research and new ideas that can come up in a year so it's natural for the same things to be repeated in XoR or R&D though mind u things that are repeated are always improved models of the previous year.

2.Faculty suks: This sem i have had Prosenjit, Kannan, Kamal, PJN, and Sanghal teach us courses. I don't think any institute in India can do that. And sometimes we have Faculty members straying outside their areas of expertise to teach us courses(eg OS, ITWS) so they are bound to look dumb. But that doesn't mean they are hopeless.


3.HSSM suks:I have taken just one HSSM till date. (Industry n Society) last sem. I went to most of the classes had cool discussions with the prof(Dr.Janardhan from HCU) and enjoyed the course. i think taking a HSSM is like taking a course. You don't take dumb courses and similarly u don't take stupid HSSM's like fine arts.

4.Mess suks:If u employ private caterers this is going to happen. The institute should have it's own cooks who are like employees. This is the sytem followed by most colleges like IIT's

5.Canteen will commit suicide: This canteen is reasonable and it will survive coz the quality is ok. Honestly i think it's difficult to have a fancy canteen coz people aren't willing to spend money to eat in it.

6.Mag team suks: I have never seen the college magzine. I think the collection of blogs in IIIT does a good job of replacing the magzine. Blogs are the new age journalism tools. Blogs rock

7.Campus Life suks: Everything is in the hands of the students. We form the councils and even control the budget. But what do we do nothing? Faculty can't help us on this.

8.IIIT as a university: I agree with u. I also see IIIT as a corporate college. To be a university the institute has to sincerely encourage other acivities. This includes Cultural, Sports and social acivites. The present management sadly, doesn't see beyond academics

9.Misuse of resources: As far as computer resource allocation is concerned whoever is incharge of computer stuff deserves to get his a$$ fried. I dont have a lab PC. When i really pestered the labcom he said i have a room pc so i shouldn't demand a lab pc. Ballz. Institute is supposed to give us atleast a pc. Finally got a pc but it had no ram, no hdd and no drives. UG2 had a meeting with the director last sem to discuss the situaton with regard to pc allocation. He said he would do something but then again....this is IIIT nothing happened

10 Grading system suks: I agree. But isin't this a risk u are taking when u make ug students tutors? and by the way 70% tutors are honest. It's some guys who do some "hera pheri" but dishonesty is dishonesty.

11. Democracy suks: Well when we have elections we vote for people we know won't work once elected and then we complain how the parliament suks. The parliament is only as good as those that are a part of it. We all know how hard Pranav works for campus life issues. But i think this is the first time he is part of the parliament. This shows how irresponsibly the students vote.

I have nothing against Halley. Personally i admire u for standing out among the crowd and speaking ur mind. Hope u read this and leave some nice commets :D

The Attendence rule in IIIT :(

Today i saw one of my batchmates pretty upset coz he didn't attend the AI class and now he's gonna lose a grade. I sympathise with him coz i'm one of the student's whose suffered a lot because of the attendence rule. I joined the institute about 15 days late(due to various reasons) and started off with about 6 absents in each subject.At the end of the semester i lost about 1 grade point and ended up with a sgpa of 6 whereas i had actually got about 7.1. I talked to the dean and the dean said that i came late and that i could "get out of his office." Numerous other people from my batch and also others have lost a lot of grades due to attendence.
If you look at the grades and their meanings here it's clear that grades are meant to reflect academic acheivement. Now if i get an "A" grade it means that i've performed excellently in the course. But in that very course if my attendence is 74% i get an "F" which means i "have not picked up any of the basic/required concepts taught in the course and have performed uniformly bad in all the assessments". How contradictory!. Aren't grades meaningless with such policies. I mean you could know everyting taught in the course get full marks in every test, every assignment and still be classified as "F" !
Secondly when a Faculty member gives you a grade he thinks you deserve that grade. Then to alter that grade for non-academic reasons is very disrespectful to both the faculty members opinion and also the hard work of the student.
And to anyone who says "grades don't matter it's about what you learn".....I'm sorry! that's how the system works. Wherever you go any faculty member will ask you your grades. Whenever you apply outside you are asked your grades. I wonder if any faculty member has had their grades deducted due to attendence during their B.Tech.
And i don't understand the need for such a rule. from what i gather senior batches like ug99 and ug2k really abused the no-attendence policy. There were people who didn't attend a single class the entire sem and still got A grades. I agreee that such a situation ruins the discipline of the college but implementing the current rules is way too extreme. Something like a 70 % attendence policy would be reasonable. Surely there must be other possible penalties for low attendence other then deducting grades.
And as for the rule it's a vague rule. And I know everybody says the dean is responsible and blah blah blah. But this is the institute policy. And such descicions aren't made by the dean alone. The director the dean and senior faculty members are all involved in this descision making. So in short all the faculty members without exception are responsible for this. I know some faculty members don't think this is the right way of doing things and but they too can't do anything.
I hope some of my fellow iiit'ians will read this and think of it as worthwhile to discuss this issue. This is a serious issue and deserves atleast a decent discussion. I feel if all students come together we can atleast force the faculty to have a rethink on this issue.