9 semesters, 5 exam committees, 4 exam rules, 3 Registrar, 2 VC, 1 university: Next is what?

Well it is said that university experience is one of the finest in life and I am sure it is true for me but the only hitch is the over-overwhelmingness of such experience especially in the field of constantly changing exam rules. In last 9 semesters I have been evaluated under 4 different exam system, coupled with the ever changing administrative set up, this rolling stone of examination rules have never gathered any constancy, in this post I seek to bring forth the various exam system faced by my batch in last 4.5 years and then try to juxtapose it with the variation in the semester wise GPA of my class to try and find out if such excessive meddling in the examination process had any effect on the marks of the batch.
But before that let us go through the examination pattern followed in the last 9 semesters, at Indian law schools there are two types of subjects, compulsory which are basic law subjects like Contract law, Constitutional law etc. and the optionals which are usually specialization avenues and offer subjects like Comparative law, International contract law etc. Optional subject are offered at my university only from 6th semester.
Compulsory subjects
When I started my university career in 2005, the marks were divided into 6 categories, End Semester, Attendance, Subj. Viva, Project, Rough Draft, Project Viva, such extensive division ensured that there was continuous evaluation and students are focused on the course. In 4th semester the marks component of rough draft and project viva was scrapped. In 7th semester the component of attendance was also scrapped, but the most tremulous change came in 9th semester when the written component was hiked to 100 and to be later scaled down to 65%.

Semester 1		Semester 2	Semester 3
End Semester Attendance Subj. Viva Project Rough Draft Project Viva	60 5 5 20 5 5	Same as Semester 1	Same as Semester 1
Semester 4		Semester 5	Semester 6
End Semester Attendance Subj. Viva Project	60 5 5 30	Same as Semester 4	Same as Semester 4
Semester 7		Semester 8	Semester 9
End Semester Subj. Viva Project	65 5 30	Same as Semester 7	End Semester Subj. Viva Project	100 5 30

Optional subjects
In my 6th semester there were 5 marks component to optional courses viz. End Semester, Attendance, Subj. Viva, Project, Presentation just like in compulsory subjects in 7th semester the component of attendance was scrapped, in 8th semester the subject viva component was scrapped for optional, and like compulsory papers in 9th semester written component was hiked to 100 to be scaled down in final result to 50%.

Semester 1		Semester 2		Semester 3
No optional subjects		No optional subjects		No optional subjects
Semester 4		Semester 5		Semester 6
No optional subjects		No optional subjects		End Semester Attendance Subj. Viva Project Presentation	40 5 5 30 20
Semester 7		Semester 8		Semester 9
End Semester Subj. Viva Project Presentation	45 5 30 20	End Semester Project Presentation	50 30 20	End Semester Project Presentation	100 30 20

Also another important change in the marking pattern was the supposed introduction of bell curve for the first time in India.

Help Wikipedia, help yourself

Hi all, I guess as law students we have frequent deadlines, projects, papers, seminars, debates, moots etc. late night research on net, frantic calls to friends, sending out mails to the whole university if one is in third year or above (the first and second years lack the courage to spam the inboxes of others, though the trend is changing fast); for all such harried souls the first (and often the last) post of resort is Wikipedia, the free, open, community managed encyclopedia. We copy, paste, format into MS word and then as teachers dont like the wiki citation we put in a name of books, law review articles the more industrious ones take links given in the reference of the wiki article and cite the same (this is in-fact accepted by law review boards, though may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction). Such has been the advent of wiki that in an offline conference an English professor of a reputed university confessed that she had taken up editing Wikipedia because most of the students copied from wiki and so it is best if they copy the right stuff. Now my friends, Wikipedia as we all know (if not search for Wikipedia in Wikipedia) is run by a non-profit organization, and Wikipedia is ad-free so it will depend on money donated by us, the users, to run its servers and other operations. A friend of mine who perhaps have never paid a single paisa for any software in life (his argument is that he pays for internet charges, so he should not be asked to pay for any other proprietary programs) has donated few dollars to the Wikimedia foundation. Just on another note, the only thing I remember from my first year economics class (apart from the supply and demand curve) is the concept of tragedy of commons, but year after year people have donated and kept Wikipedia alive so invest in wiki and just remember that investing in Wikipedia is investing on your future projects.

Takeover wars: The ‘Director’ strikes back

Few days ago I was watching a dubbed tamil movie where one of the protagonists has been thrown out of job by the owner of a factory the person swears revenge and then in the finale after lot of dhishum-dhisum the baddy loses and the hero gets the heroine and the film ends, the next day I read a story which has eerie similarity to the movie. A big industrialist Family controls two big companies manufacturing chemicals and cigarettes, a Director of the chemical factory quits (read whatever you want to read) after differences with the owning family. The Family takes a huge loan keeping in collateral some property but as clear title to the collateral could not be proved the shares of the cigarette factory owned by the Family (around 27%) is frozen by order of court. Sensing a perfect opportunity the former Director buys 6.5% of the target cigarette company and makes an unconditional open offer to the shareholders for 25% of the cigarette company’s share where around 67% is in public holding.

Let us analyze what can the Family do now, first its hands are tied by the court which attached the share by a court-appointed arbitrator, which means the voting rights on these shares have been frozen. Hence the only way to stop a hostile takeover is to use a third party like a white knight, white squire or put a plea before the individual shareholders to not support the takeover, if the management is good then most of the shareholders may reject the overtures of the raiders like holdermailing etc. The management is in the worst situation now, if the raider gets less that requisite holding then in absence of around 30% management stake to make to the magic figure the raider would need only 35% holding (presently he is aiming for around 31%); given that Indian s/h are notoriously meeting shy, it would be enough in the current situation if the raider gets 25-30% stake. If you want to read a similar real life takeover bid the read the following news paper report.