Disclaimer: This article is a work of satire and is meant for entertainment purposes only. T5E does not endorse any of the statements made in the article.
Hey there! If you’ve just joined IIT Madras, you must have been reading our Freshie Guides to get prepared (if you haven’t, you’re really going to need this article. Trust me). From sports to culturals and everything in between – co-curriculars, mental health, side hustles – helpful articles at T5E have you covered! Or do they? If you’re smart (and you are, you got into the greatest college in India), you would have noticed there’s one thing missing from that seemingly comprehensive list. How to get an S grade – the sole reason you’re joining college.
This is because getting good grades in IITM is not as cut and dry as studying and writing exams (and using the power of friendship if you’re into cheating). Here we play academic Hunger games. Most courses use relative grading, where your final grade is determined not by your performance alone, but by your performance relative to the rest of the class. You could get an S (the highest grade) with just 3 marks if everyone else got only 1, just as easily as you could get an E (the lowest passing grade) with 95 marks if you were the worst in the class.
Friends, lovers, seniors, or combinations of these, everyone’s your enemy when it comes to grades. The stakes are high, and a single mark could lead to you not clearing CG cutoffs for an internship you were really interested in. Fear not, for T5E is here to provide you with a guide of how to effectively RG your way to success!
1. Don’t Sleep
To be better than everyone else, you must be different from everyone else. Everyone else sleeps 8 hours a day; you must not. Tesla slept for just 2 hours a day, and the best RGs follow in his footsteps, trailing dozens of empty Sting bottles in their wake. Not sleeping in the night also offers other advantages – keeping the light on will affect your roommate’s sleep, reducing the competition by one. You’ll also constantly look tired and harmless, and nobody will expect you to leap into action in exams and steal away the top marks. This effect can be enhanced by catching up on sleep in class (which also provides you with much more comfortable sleeping conditions, such as air conditioning and fans that don’t threaten to fall on you à la Final Destination).
Many people fail in this step because they can’t resist the urge to doze off when near their bed. To combat this, simply don’t go to your room. This’ll save you time spent traveling to and fro and cleaning the room occasionally, because how is a room going to get dirty if nobody’s using it? Of course, to successfully RG, you must preach sleep to anyone who asks. Here’s what a former graduate (may he rest in peace) known for always getting S grades has to say:
“Remember, every second you spend catching Z’s, the S’s slip away.”
2. Go to Class
Go to class, listen, make your own notes, and you can’t be RGed by others. However simple this may sound, you’ll need immense willpower and commitment to pull it off. One must resist material temptations such as proxy offers, going to the mall with your friends, bunking class just for the fun of it, or simply staying in your bed for a while more. Of course, in the case that you need to bunk class to study for another exam to not get RGed there, do so without hesitation!
Taking digital notes on a tablet is recommended. The more daring students choose to type notes in real-time, LaTeX and markdown formatting included. Digital notes allow you to be as aesthetic as the study reels you’ve seen on Instagram, while also granting you the divine blessing of Ctrl+F. By doing so, you also save paper and do your part towards saving the environment! Just make sure you remember how to write with a pen and paper – unfortunately you’ll have to do so in exams.
Here are some tips to not let yourself be drawn away from classes:
- Don’t have friends: the most efficient, sureshot way to never be tempted to bunk class to have fun instead, or take up a proxy offer. Also see: section 3.
- Make friends with the Professor: while contradictory to the above tip, it’s unlikely that the Professor will invite you to go to the mall rather than come to their class.
Here’s what CoolPoll, IITM’s attendance tracking partner has to say:
“Attending classes is very important. Our facial detection systems are able to harvest at least 10,000 data points a day thanks to IIT Madras’ policies. Of course, we don’t use this data for any nefarious purposes, nor do we sell it – our unnaturally high profits are just a result of how much institutions are willing to pay to check if students are in class.”
3. Make Friends Strategically
Forget everything you learn in Life skills courses. ‘Supportive and caring friends’ will waste your time in the name of ‘taking care of your mental health’. You need to make two kinds of friends at IITM. The first type motivate you to study, and are ready to help you out with doubts. The motivation doesn’t need to be done actively: simply seeing them study should fill you with feelings of inadequacy and a desire to study harder than them. These people will mostly be fellow RGs and happily pretend to help you out. Make them feel that you’ve fallen into their trap: ask questions with obvious answers and so on. Don’t be surprised when their phone accidentally gets left behind in some classroom the day before the exam. There’s a chance that you might run into someone who scores through sheer passion for the subject. Like shiny Pokemon, these are rare treasures. Take a photo and move on – staring is rude.
The second type are the ones you’ll be RGing. They should be inspired by your work ethic, and feel comfortable with asking you doubts. Take the time to build their trust and answer all their questions. Then, on the day before the end semester, conveniently go missing and don’t respond to calls or texts. Bonus points if their feelings of betrayal distract them from being able to study. Of course, this gambit is hardly likely to work on the same person twice, so save the final step for when you really need it, such as a course where the end semester has less weightage than usual or where a large number of people score full marks before the end semester.
Jali Azesar is a graduate from the first batch of IITM, and here are his thoughts on the matter:
“Friendships keep your conscience free and also serve as a fair warning of RG – we IITians don’t do anything underhandedly. They’re an advance apology to the other party. You’re going to stab them in the back later, so you’ll be nice to them now to make up for it.”
4. Skip Meals
In this premier institute of the country, bodily needs are irrelevant in comparison to intellectual validation. You don’t need Vitamin A, you need an A grade. Going all the way to the mess, standing in the queue, eating food, then getting back to your favorite study spot can cost you upwards of half an hour for each meal. That’s 25% of the recommended daily sleeping time, spent just eating dry rotis and watery dal again and again! The council of hostel secretaries has put forward measures to alleviate the issue by installing vending machines in every hostel, granting you all the nutrition of mess food with none of the time spent getting it. If you study in the library rather than your hostel, Usha cafe is conveniently nearby.
Experienced seniors recommend skipping breakfast and eating at most one of lunch or dinner. The rationale is that breakfast disturbs your sleep and is also very little food, while lunch and dinner can give you enough rice to last the day. You shouldn’t need much energy to just sit and study, so there’s no need to worry about fainting/starving/dying. If your intention was never to study and you skip meals anyway, let us know – you could earn a place in Bear Gryll’s upcoming show: Man vs IITM.
By practicing the above tips, you’re sure to be top of the class in no time! You’ll have won the hearts of professors, recruiters, and admissions committees all over the globe. Whenever you see people enjoying life (a rare sight, so don’t worry too much) or witness PDA at the library (unfortunately not so rare a sight), remind yourself you’re doing this for the greater good. Which is, of course, your good. Grades get you money, and money can make you happy. But happiness can’t get you money. Stay tuned to T5E for more tips and tricks!
