On a pea-ceful Wednesday evening in late July, before the horde of freshies arrived at the gates of insti, a rather unusual mail hit every one of our inboxes. “The “W” grade is gone…! However…”. A dean’s mail styled like a panel in a cartoon strip? It had to be a hack, right? Any lingering doubts vanished upon opening the mail. The W grade was officially no more (Rest in Peas). But that wasn’t all. Out went the W grade and in came the Pea Grade.
The W grade, that infamous symbol of academic demise, had terrorized students for decades. Rumored to have been invented during the Vedic period (way before Aerowell was even a thing), it was the ultimate weapon in a professor’s arsenal against poor attendance. Miss too many classes? Forget the end sem, you’d be destined for a year-long journey of repeating the course, carrying the scarlet letter of shame on your transcript. But the Pea grade? It promised to be… kinder.
Or did it?
The email was clear: the P grade stood for ‘Poor Attendance’, not ‘Professor’s Pet’ as some hopefuls initially assumed. Unlike its predecessor, the P grade wouldn’t banish you from the endsems. Instead, it would subtly clip your wings, grounding you from taking up any Position of Responsibility (PoR). Fancy a re-evaluation of that agonizingly close A grade less than a mark away? Missed an important exam due to a health issue? Sorry, P-grade students don’t get that privilege. The message was clear: you could pass the course, but at what cost? With this letter in your Linear Grade card, it marks the last semester for you to take up any PoR.
But the devil, as always, was in the implementation.
Fingerprint Peas!
The institute had recently installed biometric attendance mechanisms at several locations. Professors across departments collectively decided it was time to use this shiny new technology to the fullest. Imagine this: an orange-alert cyclonic day, students drenched and windblown, struggling to make it to class. The attendance scanners? Closed precisely three minutes after the lecture began. Mercy? None. This was the case for students in their sophomore year. One student who was stuck in the rain and had missed 10 minutes of lecture was marked absent for a class he clearly didn’t miss. To make matters worse, he wasn’t allowed to attend the rest of the class either. Perhaps the newfound rigor might be from years of grappling with the leniency of the attendance sheets and handing the W grade.
Earlier, the W grade stamp was the ultimate trump card the Professors could pull. To maintain its comportment of shame, the professors were a bit lenient while handing them out. But the same cannot be said for P grade, for it appeared a lot kinder and easier to be slipped into grade sheets.
Deep into the pea soup (Endsems were nearing!)
The P grade had been underestimated and forgotten after that mail. But by the time the endsems hit, the professors had fully embraced their newfound powers. Rumors swirled faster than a fresher’s “Hey, which club should I join?” or “Did you try for the XYZ club?”, coalescing into a “Did you hear? Prof. Strictula handed out Pea grades like candy on Halloween. He said even an attendance record of 74.9% would be marked as Poor attendance!”
This led to outright panic among the students as they frantically checked Digicampus and calculated attendance percentages with the kind of precision typically reserved for rocket trajectories. “Okay, if I bunk one more Fluid Mechanics class but attend all of Humanities, I’ll land at exactly 75% for both. That’s safe, right?” Instructors, meanwhile, wielded attendance sheets like spreadsheets of judgment. For some, the P grade became a form of cosmic justice. For others, it was an indiscriminate scythe.
The finale of the pea-logy
The true chaos emerged when the end-sem results were released. A new column in the grade sheet revealed an astonishing number of students with a dual status: “B (P)”, “C (P)”, and even a heartbreaking “S (P)” (yes, someone with stellar exam performance but lackluster attendance managed to snag the unicorn of sadness).
But it wasn’t all bad. For some students, the P grade was a blessing in disguise. “Finally, I can miss classes and not miss out on Genshin’s new update,” said one smug second-year student with zero interest in PoRs. Another cheekily remarked, “It’s like a participation trophy but for bunking.” They even started calling themselves the “Pea Collectors.
However, the true winners were the professors. With the W grade, enforcing attendance had been like herding cats i.e., thankless and exhausting from dealing with all those proxies and saving the W grade for that one student they had never seen. But the P grade? Oh, it was the golden ticket. No need to argue, no need to negotiate. Just tally the numbers, and voila! Instant P grade. Due to its less ‘severity’, they needn’t think twice before handling them out.
Meanwhile, the admin staff’s workload doubled as the number of appeals, petitions, “Please remove my P grade, I have attached my Professor’s approval for the same” emails skyrocketed. Until the previous semester, they were only dealing with those with W grades that were far fewer in number. But with the rise of P grades, we might soon see the staff demanding for a greater paycheck for all the workflow changes they will have to do over the semester break.
By the end of the semester, the P grade effect was seen even among the freshmen. The freshies were confused but relieved to know that they could pass the exams even if they missed half the classes. But will their seniors be happy upon learning this? If so many freshies were okay with P grades, then who would run the clubs after them?
That finally leaves us with the major question – would the P grade curb chronic bunkers? Or would it create a new generation of apathetic pseudo-passers? Only time would tell. For now as the semester drew to a close, the campus existed in a bizarre limbo, where everyone feared the P but secretly admired its audacity and replacement of the W grade.
Only one thing was certain: the introduction of the P grade had forever changed the fabric of IIT-M life. In a place where every decimal point in your CGPA could make or break your future, the P grade stood as a quirky reminder that sometimes, it’s not just about showing up but also about showing up just enough (75%).