I have gained 20 lbs, and BTW, mirrors do lie. I am sure everyone must-have. It’s been more than a year since we have left our comfortable couches.
However, it’s not much of an issue. Ask students! We have found our utmost succour in being bodily present in the lecture, but not mentally. Exams and WhatsApp go hand in hand. Our fingers have become used to the Ctrl, V keys of the keyboard. Netflix, Prime, and others have become the modern age gurus.
Do institutes get the utmost pleasure in seeing the students suffer? The declaration of an online Viva examination says so. Viva is just an updated term for an oral examination, but with a bulk load of syllabus and anxiety! With only a hazy image of the last three semesters, we prepare ourselves to face the nightmare. It was chaos, with messages flooding the WhatsApp groups. Some ignorant souls asking for whatever material was available for study, while some benevolent souls helping the former. Clearly, scrolling through Instagram or binging shows during lecture hours was a bad idea.
Now everyone knew we had to cram the night before the Viva as usual. Procrastination had piled on the pressure. An intense night of study won’t help you remember information in the long term but is enough to last till the next day- a night of no sleep to be able to sit snug on the dreaded date. The present-day Spartans were now ready to fight the battle of Thermopylae, the VIVA.
The teacher called out for the first, Raj, from the list. With a heavy heart, he joined the meet. While he was contemplating every answer, the others were busy debating methods such as keeping the cameras turned off, answering only when required, confusing the panel if not knowing the answer, and sometimes fake network issues. After 15 minutes, the teacher called out for the second member, and a remaining lot of students ganged up on Raj to ask him the comprehensive details of how his Viva had been. He described the carefully designed and administered orals with a somber tone- with cameras switched on the whole time, cross-questioning on point, and the difficulty level of the topics.
Now every student was ready for the doomed session. One by one, people entered the meet and left dismayed. My session was the same, added with an extra berate of the professor. This is the price one has to pay for all the time misused successfully!
For a larger group of students, orals were a stressful experience. Somewhere, the online education model fails to keep the students engaged and interested.
Students feel they need to comprehend the practical aspect of their stream than just theoretically mugging up. Amongst all this is a pupil lost to the pandemic.
