Sam's Scribbles

Watched Inception and Memento back to back. Liked the screenplay of both the films. Must watch films.

When we were in the third semester of our BE course, we had a subject named Engineering Drawing which had both theory and practical. Theory class was for continuous three hours and that too in the afternoon session. After having a mega meal from the famous “keerthi mess” it was hard to be awake in the class room. Also, the lecturer used to give the lecture – like a doordhashan news reader – without any expression on his face. And that day, his voice was also so soft for us like a mom’s to her children. After an hour he suddenly stopped as he watched a guy sleeping. He raised his voice and shouted “How dare you sleep in my class?”.

And suddenly eight guys stood up.

FORD is “Fix Or Repair Daily” as commented by a taxi driver who owns a ford car.

In the official conference calls, when there is a beep sound, the leader used to ask ‘Who has joined now?’. Today in one of the calls, when there was a beep sound in the mid of discussion, the so clever leader asked ‘Who has dropped now?’

During my school days, as everyone else, I too hated the exams. But as usual there was no other go but I liked it one way – there wont be any class room lectures and we can return home earlier than usual. While everyone tried to write more and more and even more to get high marks, I always wanted to write less, lesser and lesser than the least and leave the exam hall ASAP (result of being in the IT field for 5 years ). For that reason I love two mark questions over five mark questions, one mark questions over two mark questions and fortunately/unfortunately there were no zero mark questions.

There were(are?) four forms of one mark questions – Fill up the blanks, Match the following, True or false and Choose the best answer. Answering a ‘Fill up the blanks’ is like diving into the well, sometimes you have water in it and manytimes not. I hate it , I hate it to the core as – when you know the answer very well but you forgot the first letter and ofcourse other letters of the word too. But you are sure that you know the answer but not able to get the word back.

In that sense “Match the following” is better. You have all the answers on your (right) hand (side). But here too there is a risk – if one of your answers is wrong then it means you got one more wrong. And to the worst case, sometimes they provide more matches on the right side which converts the matching activity into a sudoku kinda solving. As I am today, in my school days also I was innocent so that I believed everything as truth. So when it comes to True or False, I used to put true for everything and my innocence never left me less than 3/5

Then comes my favourite – “Choose the best answer” and like you, I also followed the same universal tricks :

1. The lengthiest option has more probability of being the correct answer.
2. In mathematics, an option with decimal has more probability than the integers.
3. If the answer for the first two or three questions is option number ‘x’ then the remaining questions will also follow the same rule.
4. “All of the above” option has more probability than all of the other options.
5. “None of the above” option has more probability than all of the other options but less probability than “All of the above” option

When all these tricks also started failing and when the teachers became intelligent enough to put the options like (a )only, (a) and (b) only, all except (b)… something like these, I started thinking – how easy it could be if we have an option as “One of the above”?