Engineering students these days are asked to write assignments by their respective subject teachers. Writing about 50-80 pages of assignments for each subject after spending 8 hours of the day in lectures and practicals. And based on the timely submissions of these assignments, the students would be allotted grades/marks. This would be about 20% of the grades to be reflected on the mark sheet of a student.

A trend has been set of writing these assignments without applying their brain at it, just for the sake of its completion on time. The student would just look up for the problem/question in one of their local textbooks and just copy the answer into their assignment sheet. And this set of solution would then be passed in the form of photostats and digital images into their smartphones and all of these guys get into the rat race of completing their assignments as soon as possible.

A similar trend is set with teachers; they would check and accept the submissions just for the sake of doing it. Most of them won’t care much to check if the student has done it properly or even whether the student has written it himself or made someone else do it. This doesn't really matters though. Because the only thing these assignments consume is time. A whole lot of precious time of the engineer of tomorrow, that could have been invested better in learning.

Being one of these engineering students, it really pisses me off when I think about the enormous amount of time being wasted on writing assignments, while we already have a vast syllabus to learn, study and prepare for the exams.

So, ending this little rant with a few suggestions of activities that we could replace these worthless assignments with:

·       Question and answer sessions after every class or completion of a topic/chapter- The student’s doubts about the concepts would get cleared.

·       Group discussions/revisions- Students and teacher can discuss about the concepts learned, have an in-depth study of it, assuring they have flawlessly great knowledge of the concepts they just learned.

·       Mini-Projects/Presentations- The student here has to research and learn the topic as best as they can so as to be able to present it.

And I’m sure y’all know we could reap many more benefits from the activities mentioned above.