Creative Grading at XLRI

🏃We don’t study that hard for end terms, but 10 marks made us move for 25 days straight

A professor at XLRI Jamshedpur in Term 1 added an interesting component to the scoring mechanism for the course. Most of us have seen weightage given to components like Assignments, Group Presentations, and class participation, in addition to exams. This was one we had never seen before, and 3 terms later, we still haven’t seen anything like it. It was simple on the face of it – do an activity for 30 minutes each day and create a record for it for a month. 

On the face of it, it looks innocuous enough, but it created a frenzy in the batch. Everyone was coming out, engaging with each other – playing badminton, TT, cricket, jogging – doing whatever they could for 30 minutes straight. This built a community, and people had multiple groups for different sports they wanted to participate in. The end goal – get people out of their rooms and build relationships in the real world – 𝐀𝐜h𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐝.

Some courses and professors go out of their way to build communities. I don’t see many of us studying that much – sometimes even for end terms - but those marks made us work 15 hours more, and that is just going by the minimum adherence standards. 

People spent 1-2 hours a day playing badminton (𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑑𝑜 !)

Education is shifting from traditional classroom learning to experiential learning, and this is likely the way future education will be imparted. It’s time to change the narrative from a lecture to a debate, and then to an initiative taken by the student.

Although I no longer go for jogs, I have started exercising daily to keep the spirit of the activity alive.

𝑃𝑆: A collection of jogging routes explored during that term