Copycats

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There is this wonderful news item in the front page of Deccan Chronicle (where else?) of yesterday:

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CJ suspends copycat judges, wants report

"Aug. 25: The Andhra Pradesh High Court Chief Justice, Mr Nisar Ahmad Kakru, on Wednesday suspended five subordinate judges for allegedly indulging in copying during the LLM exams held at Kakatiya University in Warangal district on Tuesday."

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Having been a student and then a teacher all my life, copying is a matter of perennial and profound interest to me. Next to setting question papers and 'correcting' the answer scripts, Invigilation is the worst duty I had to do 6 times every year. Were they paying me for teaching or policing?

I am a follower of the RKN Principle that every student should have the fundamental right to study for free whatever subject he wishes, wherever he wishes, and should have the absolute right to be not examined at all. Unlike our own Chacha Nehru generation where we had to face pass-fail exams every year, my granddaughter Ishani perhaps will have one-tenth the number of such exams, the way the trend is going. I hope that her granddaughter will live in RKN's Ideal World.

Is copying good or bad? I would say it is immensely good in a broad sense.

Supratim gifted me a 550-page book (to which I referred time and again in my earlier posts) that I read cover-to-cover last month: he is a task master forever issuing commandments like: "Thou shalt not stop teaching, nor blogging, nor guling!" Page 410 has this passage: "The 97% of our DNA commonly called junk is largely made up of clumps of letters that, in Ridley's words, exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at getting themselves duplicated." Mass -copying-machines!!!

If our DNAs were 100% copycats, we would all be clones of Adam and Eve eating clones of the same Apple, advised by the clone of their guide-serpent. It is the minority 3% that are no good at copying that lends variety and progress to life and civilization. So, the crime is not copying well but making mistakes occasionally.

During the Vedic times, there was no script nor books nor perhaps criminal copying. Some devastatingly beautiful hymn would be 'revealed' to one Rishi. He surrounds himself by a dozen or so disciples and makes them mug up that hymn and pass it on to the next generation. They all do that till one of them gets another hymn and adds it to the Veda, and the process goes on. This is nothing but 'creative verbal copying'.

With the advent of paper and printing, there was much less need for oral remembrance. Like Ishani is never going to remember her 20x20 multiplication tables: her calculator will take care of all transactions faithfully, except that it makes mistakes once in a while, and these mistakes would lead to the further 'progress' of civilization.

In our student days, copying during exams was strictly no-no. But, if you happen to have a kind invigilator, he can just pass on the 'right' final numerical answer to Question# 8 after 'looking it up' covertly from the best student in the Exam Hall. That best student would try to conceal his answer-script from the invigilator, but invigilators were too clever by half.

In the Chemistry Lab, it was ok if you could squeeze the 'salt' from the lab assistant in white overalls.

In the Physics lab, it was ok if in the dark room, you just 'focus' your friend's spectrometer by the Schuster's Method (while she was on the lookout at the entrance); but she has to do the rest of the experiment herself. She, in return, would reveal to you the 'readings' of your experiment from her elephantine memory.

If you are a teacher of QM II, say, it is not done if you bring your Class Notes of 25 years vintage and copy the contents on the blackboard, 'backing' your students instead of facing them. But, if you could mug up the entire Dirac Hydrogen Atom's 88 steps and copy them from memory with one hand in your pocket stylishly, you are a 'genius'. But the ideal teacher would distribute the damn thing to every student, ask them to throw their pens out of the window, just listen to you explain the 'concepts', facing the students, perhaps never getting up from your chair.

What a 'concept' is and how it is transmitted orally will take a book that I am going to write one of these days {;-}]

Regarding copying at IIT KGP, let my students write to me; and I would blog them with their names revealed; no 'anonymous' comments would be entertained.

I had never been a student at KGP except for one paper in Complex Variables for my Ph D qualifiers. How I copied in the midsem and endsem exams of that paper, I will sell, but not blog for free.

Any takers?

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