SIR SIR SIR PLEASE SIR PLEASE SIR

Disclaimer : Contents in the blog are strictly based on my opinions and are not meant to offend anyone. You are most welcome to agree or disagree on any of the points. Also please ignore the grammar mistakes, if any.

No No guys, I am not calling someone, but yes this is what you hear the most in some of the lectures.

Let me first introduce myself. I am a PGDM student of a new born IIM.

So as most of you know that in a B-School, marks are segregated into various portions. There are marks for class participation, quizzes, assignments, project, mid term, end term, (how you sit, how you sleep, :P) etc etc. This clearly shows the greatness of faculties. No no, its not that teachers don’t load me with assignments or like me more than others (which they actually do :P) but we have the advantage to screw some portions which won’t have much effect on our GPA.

So, why I mentioned some of the classes. The reason is that lectures of those faculties who only provide 5-10% weightage to class participation, you won’t hear a word, except from some bright students (like me :P). But there are faculties who allocate 30-40% weightage to class participation and sometimes they are accompanied by some assistant to mark the name of students. Now the show begins.

So, let’s see what are the types of participation one can see in such lectures.

Let’s begin with a positive note. There are some students who actually don’t care what weightage the faculty has given to class participation. For them, each class is similar to the other. They will prepare well before attending the class and will properly listen to the faculty and put forward their arguments or ask valid and interesting questions. This also enhances the learning of the whole batch. But some of the bright students are so much obsessed by the grades that they overparticipate (new term coined by me :P), which means that even if Professor is writing let’s say 120 X 5, they will quickly spit out the answer (and Professor is like Thank God, I didn’t know it :P).

Some students generally need a push to get things done. The increased weightage plays this role. These students also come prepared and add value to the lecture by giving valid points. But they do the preparation only for this class not the others. They have the potential but do not utilize it properly.

Now here comes a very interesting set of people. These type of students will never prepare for the class but they want nice grades. In this group, everyone wants to speak. Yes, I am focusing on the word “SPEAK” because they just want to open their mouth, no matter whether it is related to the topic or not. Sometimes they themselves don’t know what they want to say (and in this case even God also doesn’t know :P),  but they want to say something so that they can get some points. These people are not only annoying but also waste the time of the whole class. The irony is that marking the student is very much numeric in nature. For e.g., okay that student raised his hand, mark him irrespective of the fact whether he actually knows something or not. Some of these students say exactly what other person has just said and is marked by the assistant.

One common thing to note about above three types is : “Sir Sir Sir Sir Sir, please Sir please”. You will feel that as if the whole class is full of Newton and Edison.

But, there is one unique category who regularly participate in every class but do not run for marks. These are people with very high mentality which is nice. But due to this high mentality, they feel that raising their hands and screaming “Sir Sir” is against their values and they stop participating. I absolutely respect their feelings but on the same hand I would also like to say that if they involve themselves in class participation, the whole batch can learn something new. So raise points not for marks but for yourself and your batch.

And now comes the most important point. For faculty, the purpose of giving weightage to class participation is to involve everyone in the discussion. But as we have already seen what it leads to, is it really helping. The question is why the faculty is offering weightage to class participation. I can bet on my bottom dollar that even if faculty doesn’t allocate any grades for class participation, there will still be 5 to 10 students who will participate actively and make the discussion fruitful. Coercing someone by showing them the stick of grades may make them participate at that time but it actually won’t help them.

At the end, I would like to draw an analogy with what I said in the above paragraph. Similar to this, companies also have their target market and they completely focus on them. They don’t target the entire market. Many a times, it has happened that company targeting each and every one failed to do so (Marketing Gyan :P).

Thank You

Rishabh Bhardwaj

PGDM 2013-15

IIM