These days I get to hear about more incidents of rigging happening in school quizzes in Delhi. And it’s a really sad situation. Some of the best quizzes which were there (like the Agnel Talent Fest Quiz) are either no longer being held because of sponsorship issues, or their standards have declined drastically (like so many computer symposium quizzes - and I’m talking about ones like Dynamix). It seems that more of these quizzes are being leaked by the organizers to favor either the host school, or some friend they have in other schools. What these people don’t see is how it hurts their own reputation, the reputation of their quiz and their school.

Take for example the Tagore International School (Vasant Vihar) Commties Quiz 2008 held today. Prateek Vijayavargia was telling me how it was rigged to such an extent that his team’s correct answers were marked wrong (it was shown to them) and still the organizers refused to mend their error. All of this just to ensure that the host school made it to the final round. They manipulated to the extent of increasing the host school’s scores to make them qualify.

Events don’t earn respect by giving Lenovo laptops as prizes or Domino’s Pizza for lunch - they earn it by having a fair competition of all teams with high standards. At Code Wars 2007 for instance we went to great lengths to ensure that a tight lid was kept on all information. Even when our members were participating and I made the papers for some events, utmost care was taken to see that nothing leaked out. And these days we have events where the organizers are actually leaking out things to other schools too! This sort of malfeasance hurts everyone.

BTW, Prateek’s put up a few posts on some recent quizzes he’s gone to. You might want to check them out for some quiz papers.

PS (off topic) - ln (2π)…LMAO!!!

PPS - Prashanth wanted me to add here that he was not involved in Dynamix 2008, but he was involved in Dynamix 2007.

BBC NEWS - Midweek quiz: Old computers

Check out this short quiz on identifying ten of the most iconic computers in history. I got an 8 on this one. Do post you score as a comment over here after trying it out!

Gave the SAT Subject Tests yesterday (Math Level 2 and Physics). Chose the other Delhi centre - St Michael’s Senior Secondary School (it’s right next to Springdales School, Pusa Road) - instead of the American Embassy School. The atmosphere’s better, because the invigilators don’t bark at you. That, and the fact that the dustbins there are penguin-shaped. Guess whom I met over there in the morning? Gothking, from CW! (He was there to give the SAT Reasoning Test.)

I hope the ‘curve’ is lenient this time during the evaluation. With this over, I can now ‘focus’ on the Pujo. And getting a new phone.

My phone crashed yesterday. That event, by itself, is stunning since this is a dumbphone. ‘Twas just lying on the table, switched itself off - and when I powered back on, ALL of my stored data was gone. No contacts, no messages, no settings - even the phone memory and my SD card had been formatted! When I tried to re-sync contacts from a backup on my computer, I kept getting a ‘USB device not recognised’ error. Eventually I did get it to work though. This whole incident really pissed me off. And now, GPRS doesn’t work no matter how much I try the correct settings. Try calling Airtel customer care and all you get is a recorded message asking you to SMS any query to their toll-free number. When you do that, you just get an SMS back asking whether you want to know your balance. I think they’ve been playing Bureaucracy lately.

BTW, Pony is off to UK now. Back to UK, that is. On 17th. He’s planning to impress some teacher by show her Pradeep’s Fundamental Physics for Class 12. I don’t exactly have all the details on how that will work out.