How I passed the Data Structures Paper in College.

I completed my Bachelor of Engineering in 2011 in India. We had a paper on Data Structures and Algorithms in the 3rd semester. The classes used to be 3 hours of theory and 1 hour of lab per week. Of course, the lab was open from 9 am to 5 pm on all working days but nobody cared.

The syllabus was fantastic and covered everything from abstract data types to graphs. The teaching method adopted by the professor was no different from any other undergrad Indian college or school. It was a discourse with little room for class participation or critical thinking. Any student with curiosity and therefore needs to interact in class was usually mocked and highly disliked by the rest of the pack. This is a 100% true even today. The lab sessions used to have a set of 12–15 programs that we had to work on C++ for the entire semester.

Before any test (pen and paper), we used to sit in groups of 3 or 4 and memorize the binary tree search and disjoint set. And if there was any question in the paper which was remotely related to what we had learnt, we would end up writing the entire theory on it in the hopes of getting some grace marks. In the mid term lab exam, the professor surprised us by setting questions outside of the 12–15 programs. The entire class failed. The next few days were spent on trying to code the out of syllabus questions. Sigh!

In the final lab exam the scores of which are sent to the university, we were calm as hell. The entire class knew that the questions had to be the programs we had worked on. (The college couldn’t afford to lose the pass percentage). I got a question which I had rote learned the previous night. Hey, only the logic is memorized okay, the variables used and all are different. I finished the 2 hour exam in 15 mins and got an A.

This is the scene from the Indian education system (barring a few top notch colleges). You rote learn logic, mug up algorithms and spit it out during the exam. In the next semester you have no clue what you had learned in the previous and naturally you do not appreciate the course. If you study in a fairly good college, you get placed by the end of 7th semester. The project in the 8th semester is usually cut-copy-paste or worse bought from the shops which proudly display “Final Year Projects”.

At the end of all this, you really begin to learn only after 2–3 years of working in an MNC IT company and only after you realize that you can’t progress much unless you know how to code. This is true only if you are open to the progress and disruption that is happening around. Otherwise, you stay there, you slog. Become a team lead in 8 years and stagnate there,forever. Whenever I see students signing up on online platforms to learn I feel happy. Until there is a sea change in the way courses are taught, rather experienced in India, this might be the only way out.