Class Statements III

After publishing the second edition here, following are 3 more brilliant statements made in some of my classes this term.

3. There is a concept of Class Participation (CP), wherein, an individual is evaluated on the basis of valuable inputs made during the discussion in a class. Since it involves marks, everyone tries to pitch in. So, sometimes people just speak for the heck of it and it is labeled as DP or desperate participation. Though, CP marks are given on the basis of contribution made throughout the course, some people realise it very late in the course that they have not done any CP till date. This happened with one of my classmates in one of the subject called "Strategic Human Resource Management in Services." In one class, he just started to make "too much" contribution to the discussion and the Prof. understood this. So, after some time, Prof. finally said, "Enough for today, you have already got 0.00001% of your CP marks today." ;)

2. In the same subject, we were discussing a case on a particular Airline and discussion was on how to motivate different employees of an airline - crew, staff, ground handling people, pilots etc. For every category, we came up with solutions to motivate them except for pilots. The argument was that pilots are already well-paid, command a premium as they are rare, given facilities etc., so nothing extra can be done to motivate them to perform in their job. This is when one of my classmates came with this - "Pilots have a personal interest in performing in their job." Implying non-performance will result in death ;)

1. I have taken a subject called "Fixed Income Markets." As the name suggests, it deals with fixed income instruments like bonds, T-bills etc. So, we had an excel based quiz in which questions needed to be solved using Excel. The test was really tough and all of us were really hit hard by it. After the test was over, the faculty understood the situation and said, "Now you know why are bond traders paid so much!"