Month: December 2005

I talked about MDI, Exams and Highlighters in a previous post. There is yet another thing that people are MDI are very passionate about – taking reading material to examination halls.

Examinations at MDI are a cake walk. Most of the exams are open book. One can carry any number of books, presentations, printouts, handouts, notes, reference, newspapers etc. in the examination hall. Before coming to MDI, I was not even aware that this kind of concept even existed. It was like a dream. But as it happens very regularly, dream shattered when I realized the realities of rankers.

Rankers = People who secure good marks, good CGPAs and can boast about their ranks at MDI.

Few Observations

1. Except for the top three rankers and bottom 20 rankers, the amount of reading material carried in the examination hall is directly proportional to the marks you get. This is unsensical (yes… unsensical) to me. If you are fourth from the top, you should not carry a single thing. You should know a lot more and if I am fourth from bottom, I should be the one who should carry stuff to the hall, be tense all the time and rush to the photocopy shop. But strangely it’s opposite.

2. The photocopy shop becomes the favorite hang out of all the rankers. People with high ranks are seen making umpteen numbers of trips to the photocopy shop at odd hours. They would know of every photocopy machine in the vicinity of the hostel and would know the amount of carbon left in it, the schedule of power outage and what not.

3. Not to forget networks and group work. Rankers work in groups. They follow a Hub and Spoke model with one person stationed at the photocopy shop and rest of the group spread at vantage points in campus (computer centre, library, rooms of other toppers etc.) to collect as much reading material as possible and bring it to the photocopy shop to get as many copies as possible.

As always More to come later …