Failing a Course at IIT

I had failed a first semester course at IITK, albeit temporarily, and the whole ordeal was pretty frustrating.

I was at home for the winter break, and had asked my roommate to check my grades. He called me and told me that I had a 10 and I was so happy. When I returned to IITK and checked my grades myself, I found that I did indeed have an A in all credit courses, but had got a fail grade in the wonderful Morning Exercise (PE101) course.

For those who don't know much about how stuff works at IITK, PE101 and PE102 (the even semester Evening exercise counterpart) are the two most useless courses at IITK. Twice a week, you are supposed to go for sports stuff for an hour or so in the evening (though the course is named morning exercise). If you are good enough to be selected for the institute sports team, you have to go for practice for that. Rest of the public are slotted into the dreaded NCC. There are no credits for this course, but you fail it if you don't have 75% attendance. There were stories of high CPI students who had to stay after their expected graduation time simply because they couldn't clear one of the PE courses.

So I had failed this silly course for lack of attendance, and the reason was that I was on leave for more than two weeks to represent India at IOI 2007. I had done most of the stuff to ensure that the weeks of leave did not affect me. I had talked to every course instructor and had taken care of labs and quizzes and stuff. The NCC people were the biggest pain. I tried to tell them that I had the institute leave letter and that I was going to represent India at an international event, but they kept repeating "Less than 75% attendance, you will fail". I gave up on them since I worked out that I could manage the 75% attendance If I did not miss a single NCC parade day while I was on campus.

What I had counted wrong was the number of evening exercise days. Apparently, there was an extra evening exercise day while I was away that I wasn't aware of, and that meant that I was one day short of managing the 75%.

I spent a lot of time screaming silently and pulling my hair out. I was now the quintessential muggu guy that people made stories out of : The ten pointer who couldn't pass the PE course. The jokes were already starting, and the reception from home wasn't too positive either. I had never failed a course in my life, and this course definitely didn't deserve to be the first.

What really worried me was the possibility of losing my scholarship due to  this mess. I had been the recipient of KVPY fellowship since XI standard. 50K+ per year was not a small amount of money to pay for fees, and the scholarship helped ensure that I didn't have to bother my parents for the same. Every year, the scholarship is renewed on the condition that academic performance is satisfactory and some research activity is done. If the fail grade wasn't changed by August when I was supposed to send the renewal request, I would probably lose my scholarship.

I decided to take my chance and talk to the dean of students affairs (DOSA), who was also the official instructor for this course. Prof. Prawal Sinha was really nice to me, though he did take the opportunity to tell me how it was was stupid of me not to take care of this earlier. He assured me that he will take care of the grade.

But boy, did it take long. I had to run from office to office in the old and scary Faculty building for weeks and months. I had talked to DOSA in early January. End of Jan, Feb, there was no change. I got progressively more and more restless. Kept meeting DOSA and the UG section in-charge every week or so. I even wrote a mail to the director, which the DOSA didn't like much. I probably ran around the campus more to get my grade changed than most students did during the PE sessions.

Eventually, somewhere around March-April, the grade was changed and I got the modified transcript. This was more relieving than anything that happened to me at IITK. The computer system that takes care of grades and stuff claimed that I had both passed the course and had a backlog in it. Got that bit fixed in my third year or something, but that took merely three or four visits to the UG office.

-Raziman T.V.