Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Can our examiners be bought over????

Consider this incident.. Three candidates are sent for VIVA to a professor. They are asked to meet the professor and then decide the order of the VIVA among themselves. So all three of them walk into the professors room and the professor naturally take the project report from the first person to walk into the room. So as the others wait on, the prof ask the candidate to give an overview of the work. After a brief overview, the candidate suggests to go thru the prepared presentation to which the prof disagrees and asks to continue the talk. Prof interrupts the candidate and asks questions on the work as he browses through the report and presentation submitted. It gets over without much problems and the candidate gets a grade "Good" but comments on somethings that could have been done better. Now the candidate starts saying that there were just 3 months to finsh the work and had responsibilities at work and home in addition to this dissertation. So the prof should not expect everything to be done and again repeats her request to present the prepared slides as there was a lot of time spend on preparing them. The prof disagress and grades the work. Now the candidate opens a box of sweets and offers it to the prof whihc he declines. As the candidate perseveres, the prof takes a piece of the sweet. Now the candidate says that the entire box is for him which he declines and asks the candidate to offer it to other fellow candidates. Now the sweet is offered to the other two candidates and the remaining box is left on the prof's desk for him even when he says he doesnt need it. After sometime the candidate returns for some favour and then the prof forces the candidte to take the box of sweets back as neither he or anyone at home will be able to have the sweets...

There are few questions that this raises.. Should candidates be allowed to get sweets or other gifts to evaluators?? How should the candidate be evaluated if he/she persists that I have prepared this ways and hence the evaluation needs to be done that way. Or should it be left to the evaluator to decide the method of evaluation?Should the examiner have waited till the candidate returned for favours to return the sweet box? Should the candidate be given negative marks for trying to gift the evaluator? Should it be taken as a form of bribe?

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