Many of the nicknames we bestowed on our professors had to do with examinations. There was "Cup-cup-Rao", so called because he usually flunked a substantial part of his class. He flunked 18 of my 43 classmates when we first took his course. A flunking grade was not F but U (for Unsatisfactory). The resemblance of U to a cup and his actual initials ( V.V. ) cemented the name for generations of undergraduates.
The thing was, we assumed that that is the way college life was supposed to be. If you did badly in a test, you got flunked, regardless of how the rest of the class did. And some of my classmates, who ended up as graduate teaching assistants for undergraduate students in American universities, would recount with wonder the aspirations of their students. "There is this fellow," said one, "who came to me and said that he'd studied four hours for the test and yet had done badly." And we would all nod in sympathy. After all, no one guaranteed that you would perform well if you studied hard. The two things were separate. In our experience, at least, it was.
The reason all this comes up is that a recent BusinessWeek article was about the IITs. The article stated that the grueling, uncompromising curriculum is responsible for the success of so many graduates of the school. Me? I have my doubts. The grueling pace drove one of my friends to attempt suicide and destroyed the self-esteem of many otherwise bright people. A few successes do not compensate for the hundreds of defeated persons the system produces.
