A Pain in the Assignment
It’s a brand new day, and well, a (not so handful few) brand new deadline(s) to meet! Did you just blink?! I am sorry, you wasted a lot of time in doing so and it’s late into the night now! The most dreadful EOD is approaching faster than the speed at which the tempo chant escalates at Kharagpur. Everyone’s on it, ‘it’ being the divine network that connects humanity and preserves goodness: the internet. Sweaty fingers hitting the keys on the keyboard like Lars Ulrich hit his drums, foreheads wrinkled in deep confusion over some godforsaken theorem “they” were supposed to have mastered but cannot recall having ever seen the face of, stomachs grumbling because “they” skipped dinner for lack of time… A lot of effort went into doing the eternally ill-timed entity called The Assignment. And whenever a lot of effort goes into something, it is worth asking: what really came out of it, and was it worth it? For fear of losing the reader to a belief that this is going to be that ubiquitous hackneyed rant about assignments, before we move any further, let us get something straight: we are not suggesting that assignments are futile. But we do have some observations that need to get across, and hence, the article.
So, what really is the trouble that makes the students rather give more effort to just get their assignments done than learn their courses for real and then do them the way they are meant to be, which would, in many cases, be the easier way as well? Why would anyone work harder to achieve less? The answer to that is an elaborate vicious cycle they can neither get out of nor explain anyone.
Since it’s a cycle we are talking about, there is no real starting point, but there’s this point we can pass off as a starting point: the “Agla Sem phodenge” point towards the end of a semester you know is a failed cause. Cut to the day the revered “Agla Sem” in the picture arrives. You get up early, take a bath, turn to the first page of a brand new notebook and embellish the top of the page with the name of the topic and the date, as your primary school teacher taught you to in the good old days. You think to yourself, “I will listen carefully in class this time over!” And the Professor enters — or appears, to be precise — and there you are, hanging by his every word… Until that moment when the world goes silent, only to be broken by the cacophony of Teams announcing that you lost your connection. You switch networks, move your network device around, pray to the Gods — do everything at your disposal to get reconnected. And when you finally do get reconnected, in the course of a few minutes, all the same, everything that follows is gibberish. It’s as if the Professor taught entire chapters while you were disconnected (which, if we didn’t know any better, was probably the case!) Then you retire to deciding to watch the recording after the class; but as the “fates” would have it, it is here that the gruesome deadline enters the scene. You get umpteen deadlines to meet by the next day (notwithstanding the premise that it is the first day of the semester we are talking about), which prevent you from watching that class’s recording that you missed. And there you are, the next day, attending a lecture you missed the beginning of. The days roll by, the backlog keeps piling up, and where you had started off hanging by each word of the Professor, you hang in for dear (academic) life instead.
Given the state of affairs such as the above, it isn’t all that surprising now why someone would work harder to achieve less: for lack of better humanly possible options! There is always another deadline lurking around the corner that you can barely just achieve; pausing to learn — which ironically is the whole motivation behind it — and then applying your learning to get the assignment done is simply out of the picture, in the course of a single lifetime, that is.
Connectivity issues might just be one of the myriad reasons that would bring upon someone this conundrum. Still, the very real concern is, never mind the exact stimulus, almost everyone finds themselves ensnared in this nasty web of trying to catch up with the uncatchable! All thanks to the “ingenious” way the evaluation process is thought of and executed in the online classes!
What needs to be understood is that online classes (and the evaluation process thereof) cannot just be a run-down the-best-that-can-be-done-under-these-circumstances version of offline classes; they have to be ideated and planned in an altogether different way from scratch. Online lab classes cannot just be a video demonstration of what we would have done had we been at the lab in person, nor of course, the much worse, “do the lab report, submit on time and be done with it” thing.
Phew, so much for what’s wrong! What can be done to better this, you ask? Well, a lot! For starters, as we just mentioned, the whole system has to be rethought from scratch. And while doing so will undoubtedly result in a great many brilliant ideas, the following is a piece of our brilliancy.
The assignment as a means of continuous evaluation could be replaced by a regularly monitored term project that could incorporate into it the everyday lessons from the course. A term project would fulfil the same purpose and uphold, if not exceed, the standards of the run-of-the-mill assignment, while also conceding a certain degree of much-needed flexibility into the evaluation process. Furthermore, a term project would elicit a sense of “owning their work” from students. And a little mercy on students, in the way of not darting through presentations at a speed of 42 slides per second and scheduling 121 tests a week, would not hurt either! In fact, the term project thing is thought of under the (perhaps too optimistic) assumption of such mercy being extended.
Here’s to hoping you are still hanging by the Professor’s words, and not hanging in for dear life! Until next time, folks!
