My semester exams are going on now and I have been (supposedly) spending most of my time studying for it. Not really studying, its more like mugging up. That makes me wonder how good an evaluation system our B.Tech examinations are.

From what I know, an engineer must be someone who applies his knowledge to engineer some ingenious things. Does that mean he needs to remember every theory in the world word-by-word? Hmm. Our University of Kerala seems to think so, unfortunately. The whole model and structure of their examinations makes us not want to apply anything anywhere!

We had this subject called “Information system for managers” this year. It was a rather interesting paper, but somehow the univ guys have managed to spoil it. You ask anyone in my class what the paper was about and I’m sure not one of us would know anything more than you do :D . The question papers seem to be testing our memory and not whether we have actually understood what the good old proffessors had written in those textbooks. I thinks its time that the whole written exam thing is scrapped, atleast modified. I mean wouldn’t it be better if an engineer is evaluated on how many useful things that he can do rather than test how many bytes of information he has stored in his brain. I know its not something that will change overnight. But surely its doable.

Then you might ask me.. How to make that change? Hmm.. I’m just a poor engineer from the University of Kerala. How would I know! ;)