Exam jitters --NAY, Not for us--

--SnoopDog--

Exam time... Comes twice a year for lucky undergrad students but not for velammal students... nooooooooooo... not for us, who have already been subjected to lot more cruelties in velammal... After all the mid-terms, its time for a mad scramble for internal marks, which will normally tally to 19 or (the max) 20 unless the lecturer has a personal vendetta against you (which most of the time happens... hey, juz now it struck me, if V is for vendetta according to the popular movie, then VEC would expand to Vendetta Engineering College... whoa, that sounds so apt... Hope the management doesn't read this... lol)

Then comes the semester exam, spread over the duration of a month or two like the obsolete CB series format down under... If you are subjected to this torture for once a year like in SSLC or 12th board exam, you can think of pulling the plug before the exam... But writing exams every other 6 months over a course a 4 years really takes the charm away from it... That's what happened with us...

--First semester--
The exam starts at 10 am while the college bus drags us outta our houses & dumps us in college at 8:25 am... So we sit in the corridor or exam halls, preparing for the next 3 hrs like there is no second chance (obviously getting an arrears is a bad thing) Mugging up formulas, scramming through pages till the hall correspondents bully you to go inside... yup, that was us, like every other student taking the exam on the same day... After the exam, discuss all the questions, in and out, and by the time we get finished, we would already know how much our percentile would be...
There was one exam that needs special mentioning here though... Engineering Mechanics... The question paper leaked and I still remember sk calling me at night and asking for help to solve some problems... But he didn't come that night & we ended up solving the paper on bus, but we were vary if the leak was true... To our surprise, it was the real deal and I thought I had aced it... But Anna Univ got the wind of it and cancelled the exam and rescheduled it... They set the toughest paper possible, I think even they couldn't come up with a proper answer key... Passing that exam was like a flip of a coin... Around one-third of the class failed and those all who passed did so by hanging on to a thread... The arrears percentage reduced considerably after revaluation (wait for a note on the king of revaluation, it will be explained in the end of the post) and the arrears exam was so easy that not only did everyone pass, they aced it... Arvind, one of the unlucky ones to get the arrears, became the topper in that course after the arrears exam (not so unlucky now, huh)
...Alls well that ends well...

--Second semester--
Refer First semester first paragraph... The other insignificant thing that happened with this exam is that I managed to top it, atleast to my surprise...

--Third semester--
By now most of us were immune to the exam fear, so much that we would sit in the corridors and make fun of each other instead of studying... The group kalasal gang included BBB, shivaram, nambi durai, rosaraman, gokul nath and a few others... Our main target of kalasals would most of the time be Gokul... Me & shiva would rip him apart... Also senthil and prathap would contribute with their group studying escapades... The attention of the group would sometimes shift to nambi and sampath... We used to create so much raquet that sriram, prem nath and many others would maintain a safe distance from our sphere of influence... As the exam time neared you would expect the intensity to reduce, but the hero madhan would make his appearance at this critical moment along with avinash and sk...
The whole scenario double folds after their entry as we gang up on madhan and he wont go down without a barrage of mokkai... Also we would be bedazzled by madhan's use of technology to compress long answers into cryptic numbers which only he could decompress, and store them in calculator memory... I can go as far as saying that madhan's patented compression technique can beat WinRAR, as it can compress answers spanning 5 to 7 pages into a 32 digit number which will easily fit into a calculator memory... (One time he didn't have enough memory in his calculator to store all the answers) So me and shiva would store these digits in our calculators and get a quick decompression tour from madhan which would eventually make us forget everything we have read so far, and in the end, even forget the technique itself... So that's how I went from being a topper to nobody in my class, all thanks to madhan & shivaram...

--Fourth semester--
Sins from third semester gets repeated

--Fifth or sixth semester--
Loganathan a.k.a carrot got caught for copying by examination committee member... The incident sounds serious, but the way it happened was interesting... I don't remember which exam it was but carrot decided to go fully prepared, and hence, decided to make cheat notes (or bit) to bail him outta the exam... He was strong hearted till he entered the exam hall, when he bailed out and decided not to use the cheat sheets... So everything was going fine until the committee guy came & checked carrot... Carrot forgot to throw away the cheat sheets and got caught even though he didn't use it... Talk about irony... He appeared before some disciplinary committee.. So thats the action we got other than the pre-exam jibes...

--Seventh semester--
If normal semester exam schedule seemed long, this particular semester's exam was like the 2007 cricket world cup... Everyone just wanted it to end, as the result was known even before half the event was over... The thing with this semester was that the rain gods finally decided to bless chennai and bless they did... The roads were flooded making us not wanting Cauveri water anymore... So the vlsi exam got rescheduled 3 times totally... The first time everyone felt revealed coz there was lot to study as we literally didn't listen to Rajnarayan sir when he was teaching to the board instead of the class... The second time, we all thought of it as a holiday and the third time was one time too many... I didn't feel like going through the material again... I was so sick of VLSI that I ended up choosing the same for my Master's specialization (LOL) I got 70% in the end, not too bad, but something which I wouldn't tell my advisor ;)

--Eight semester--
Only two subjects, so it was like the test match india won against australia in 2 days on the mud bed in mumbai... But it was the last time we got to tease and play around before exams... Very sentimental semester, except for one idiot who VEC hired to critic our projects :)

--King of all revaluations--
Let the numbers speak for itself...
First semester - 2 arrears, cleared after revaluation
Second semester - 2 arrears, cleared after revaluation
Third semester - I dunno if he had any, let me ask him about this...
Fourth semester - 2 arrears, cleared after revaluation
Money spent - 6 times Rs 600 = Rs 3600
Having NIL arrears in your certificate - PRICELESS

Everyone put your hands for Madhan Kumar, the true king of all revaluations...