ASSIGNMENTS. The Beginning And The Ending Of Engineering.

Assignments.. Yes.. Doesn't it make you shiver and send chills up your spine??
Well, it would if you are studying Engineering. From the day you enter an Engineering college till the day you leave it you do nothing worthwhile but write assignments.

Typically assignments are meant me to be written individually. It is a test to see how much you know and it is to rate where you stand in understanding the subject and how much you listened in class.

But what do you do if you don't listen in class???
Do I have a tried and tested solution for you!

When assignments are announced all of us very VERY enthusiastically line up in the xerox counters to take copies of the questions and shell out money like as if we earned it just to have a copy. And after you have your own copy in your hand you are very satisfied.. like as if you have ACTUALLY completed it. The copies are carefully folded and kept safely in your bag. So safely that you would NEVER EVER take it out.

And throughout the week you have your fun and as for the assignment ha! thats the last thing on your mind.

The day of submission comes and morning we come prepared to class with sheets to copy the assignments from the first row people who have actually finished it. An you think "hahaa what losers. I'll just copy it from them." And so 90% of the class sits to copy from the remaining 8% (the 2% just don't write it). The ultimate test of your capabilities is when you have to meet a dead line in five hours and every other hour you have classes. This might seem impossible to an ordinary person. But to us, the super-Enigneeers its a piece of cake.

Note: copying assignments improves our hand writing and writing at lightining speed it is still very much legible.

So by the end of the day we all manage to finish it and submit it like as if we have toiled oh-so-hard on it. The botom line is that all the 50 papers submitted have the same content and the same mistakes and more often than not the same number of pages. When the papers come back from correction everybody gets the same score but sometimes the the copier gets one mark more than the copiee. This happens only if you are very lucky.

All this hard work done with a loss of blood, sweat and tears is done just for one sole cause-
the dreaded INTERNALS.

And ironically this post was inspired when I was doin an assignment all by myself for the very first time due to unavoidable reasons. And i missed the thrill that comes with copying assignments.

Ask ant Engineering student, everyone has a story behind their assignments, some bad and some exceptionally life altering. =)