Every year, a school in the city hosts a series of computer related competitions. Students from the 3rd grade to the 10th grade can participate and the topic ranges from MS Paint to HTML. Of course, students from that school participate as well.

I myself have participated in that competition every single year since 3rd grade and have won a few times too. But, most of the times, the winner is from their school.

They also host a quiz, computer based of course, where teams of 3 can participate. There is an elimination round and after that, 4 teams are selected for the finals. Well, I only participated in it once and sadly, my team wasn't selected.

However, my friend's team was selected and so, I decided to stay and watch the final round of the quiz. And what I saw pretty much made me lose faith in the school.

It started with introductions and it was all fine till then. But, when the questions were asked, all we got to see was the host doing




Of course, they gave the right answer, unlike drunken replies by Charlie Sheen. But, this was happening, which made all of us think...why had all these students come to this school, on a sunday, to watch the host school win their quiz, because they already knew the questions?

The only other explaination is, the students are psychics.


But, of course, why would they cheat?

NIE (Newspaper in Education, a subsidiary of The Times of India) hosted a competition, Think 'n Learn challenge a few weeks ago. They sent question sheets to 125 schools in my city and we had the 1st round in our school itself. It was just a simple test which had puzzles that required logical and analytical reasoning. No one really took it seriously until one of us read the rules and saw "Winner at the school level will receive a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3".

That being said, everyone started writing the test sincerely. It was just a multiple-choice test and we were done with it in an hour. For the next three weeks, we had all forgotten about it.

But then, last week, the results were declared. From our school, out of around 200 participants, 53 had received 90+ percentile and had qualified for the next round, city level. However, the winner of the school round was not declared. So, we all had to attend this next round.

The venue was a huge stadium, obviously meaning that a lot of children were going to be there. On reaching, we found out that a whooping 6000 students had qualified for this round, which meant that the competition was tough. For this round, instead of pen and paper, we had to do the test on a Samsung Tab.

The test itself was pretty much the same. Didn't feel like it was any more difficult than the previous one and our competition had definitely narrowed down to 6,000, instead of 40,000.

After the test, we had a one hour session on career options by a person named Byju, who cleared the CAT exam with a 100 percentile, twice. More on that later.

One thing that the person told us was, what we are doing in school now is not learning, we are memorizing. After the exam, we forget. But, if we use our common sense (which according to him, is not that common), we can simply learn without memorizing and we won't ever forget it.

Apart from that, it was a really good competition. I'm still waiting for the city level results although, since I didn't win at school level, my hopes aren't that high. 

Recently, my school received the opportunity of meeting the ex-President of India, Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam. A lot of people have told me how it was an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and envied me. But, I simply don't understand what the hype is all about.

As opposed to an actual meeting, this was more of an event where he was also present. So, none of the students actually got to meet him, per se. We were merely present when he delivered a speech. The speech was really inspiring and motivational, no doubt. But, the same points were also discussed in school, when we were told about this event. We weren't told anything we didn't already know, about him, or his work.

After the speech, I was looking forward to the Q&A session, as we would be able to talk one-on-one with the man and ask him questions. But again, we found out that the questions that were to be asked had been pre-discussed and the ones who were going to ask them were already picked. Moreover, he also mentioned that he would only answer 3 questions, which meant that there was no chance of any of the other 2000 students present there of asking a question of their choice.

So, we travelled for around 1 hour, waited for his arrival for 45 minutes, had a short welcoming ceremony and other event formalities in the next 30 minutes, listened to a 15 minute long speech (which we had already heard) and then had a fruitful 10 minutes of Q&A where pre-discussed questions were asked by pre-picked children.

What was supposed to be an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of meeting the "Missile Man" of India had just been a show, planned by the teachers. It had no more than 20 actors and actresses, while the other 2000 guests wasted more than 150 minutes of their life for the 10 minute Q&A session at the end.

Worth the effort?

PS: I would have posted a photo of the ex-President but, of course, cameras were not allowed.