Invigilation Duties

For a change, I was on the other side of the fence. And I was astonished to learn that the grass is indeed greener on the other side. Now you might argue that the grass being greener on the other side is an allegory and that it shouldn't matter much to a human (bovines may beg to differ) This article however has nothing to do with my love for grass (pun unintended) Its more to do with one of the duties that I had to perform as a self respecting Masters student. Mind you, Invigilating for an examination is not the most exciting of pastimes : watching a plant grow is more exciting than standing in an examination hall while students around you are racking their brains, with concerned expressions on their faces, thinking, "If alpha times omega is equal to beta, what the hell was I doing last night instead of studying?". I did not shy away from this duty. As I said, I am a self respecting, righteous, honest and vertically integrated (whatever that means. I heard it in a movie called Miami Vice) person and there was no way I was not going to perform my duties. My scholarship depends on it.

One of the hazards of being an invigilator for an exam which has abstract questions and expects abstracter answers is that you have to stop people from copying or using inappropriate methods to complete their exam papers. While this is bound to happen even in the best of places, I have reason to believe that the country is going to the dogs. In a place which prides itself on being the numero uno technological institution in the country, the level of the students, with respect to their mastery over inappropriate methods, is very poor. It was really depressing to see the students use such archaic methods such as glancing into his / her neighbour's answer book to copy. This method was used when I was pursuing my undergraduate studies some quadrizillion years ago. Not that I practiced this fine art. Since I was an intelligent and hard working student, there was nothing LEFT for me to copy. I always knew the RIGHT answers. Here's an illustration for those stupid enough not to understand what I am saying.

As a result of my RIGHTEOUSNESS, I always managed to score well in my exams. Is there anything more LEFT to say? Okay, enough of those puns. Coming back to life is a song by Pink Floyd. And coming back to the point at hand is the sentence that I use most in all my articles. This is because I have a tendency to stray from what I had started speaking about initially, and which is precisely what I have done in writing this very sentence itself and something which you will realize only after the sentence is over, about which, considering its length till now, you are still wondering whether to report it to the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest, meaningless sentence that tries to explain the futility of my articles with respect to my continual and obstrusive deviances from the topic at hand. (Statutory warning : Reading blog articles with long meaningless sentences may be harmful to the invigilator's health)

Anyway, coming back to the article (Here I go again) I realized that there is a serious need of some good training institute to indoctrinate in the students the lost Art of using Inappropriate Methods to Succeed at EXams. (AIMSEX) I know that the abbreviation is a bit misleading, but hey! Whatever helps business is cool by me. I plan to start such an academy (in conjunction with ASSHOLE) This will help the country by making me wealthy and thereby reducing the need for me to write blog articles. I will write in detail about the methods I propose to teach the students to help them succeed. For now, I need to collect and assess their answersheets.