It is in the air

Come December and it is in the air. Not Christmas, but the dreaded University examination season. I can say that I have never celebrated a Christmas or a New Year without the fear of exams in the near future since I have joined the college. I have missed all my cousins' weddings in the past three years and most of their engagement ceremonies. This University has got something against me. Wven if there are no exams on a day I want to celebrate, it postpones the exams to that particular date so that I may give the celebrations a miss.

By the time I complete my fourth year, I would have written about 150-200 tests. I am tired of telling everyone that I have got exams every time they call me. Now thet take it for granted that I will be having exams. So no one bothers to invite me, I guess.

The problem with having so many exams is that you start to lose your motivation to study if the marks you score do not have a direct relationship with the effort you put in. And my University is quite notorious for that.

I have been having my lab internal exams for the past two days. I was scheduled to have it yesterday at 9 in the morning. I decided to wake up at four and study for it. The lab was foe Assembly Language Programming and I hadn't written an ALP on my own till date. When my alarm rang, I just switched it off and went to sleep again. I woke up at 7:15 a.m and started studying. By 9, when I reached the college, I had gone through the programs I had written in my record.

The exam started at 9:30 a.m. My question was to arrange an array of ten random numbers in ascending order using Bubble Sort. An easy program, compared to the ones I dreaded. I drew the flowchart, wrote the code and started coding. To the horror of my horrors, I found that the '+' sign in my keyboard wouldn't work. That meant that half my code was pure waste. I would need more registers if '+' didn't work. "Mere saath hi hamesha aisa kyun hotha hai?", I thought as I glanced around at the happy faces coding their microprocessors.

I remembered our HoD's words: 'As an engineer, you are supposed to make things work - by hook or by crook. People outside will not listen to your technical difficulties. What they want is the final product.'

That 'hook or crook' sentence has been my greatest inspirational motto at the college. Till date, thankfully, I have had to use only hook. But this keyboard was tempting me to be a crook. I thought, "What if I just rearrange the numbers in ascending order and report the output?" I had about five minutes to rewrite the complete code and execute it.

However, fortunately, since my mom brought me up to be honest at my life in general and the exams in particular, I decided to do it the right way.

My thought process went like this: So I need more registers. That means I will have to use pointer registers as general registers. That means I can't do it with 8 bit numbers. I have to upgrade to 16 bit...." In three minutes I wrote down a brand new program, entered it as fast as I could and checked the output. It worked! I called ma'am and showed her the output. She asked me to check for another set of numbers. I did that and joyfully walked out of the lab.

Later I came to know that the machines had some problem with the '+' sign. It functioned wrongly when it saw the '+' sign. So all the students who had used [SI+2] observed the phenomenon of their code changing into something else when they ran the program. They couldn't figure out what was wrong. I was lucky that my '+' sign didn't work.


Moral of the story: Whatever happens, happens for good. And honesty is still the best policy when taking exams. (Courtesy: Mom's sayings)