My Programming Lab University Practical Exam

And today was the day people predicted to be the day. It had to happen today. There simply wasn't any other option. The examiner would decide that she deserved a few pints of blood, after holding back a little bit the previous day. But then again there always are a few who simply yield as soon as they hear the magic sentence. Death is inevitable in their case. They would rather die painlessly than face a slow and painful death.

Then of course there are the few who face the challenge boldly and come out alive. Every single time. People don't understand how they do it. They just do it. And finally there are the rest of them, who are neither here nor there. If they escape once, they'll surely die the next time. They have no idea how they got out the first time, they just say they were lucky.

So it was, for my practical examination. The first two batches got fairly easy problems to solve, and so everyone was worried we would be the lamb to the slaughter. So, although I was confident in my abilities, I was a bit more nervous than usual. That is, until I heard the dreaded magic sentence,

Write a program to check whether a matrix is symmetric or not.

At first I couldn't believe my ears. Did she really say that? Woah, that would take merely a half hour to complete, and didn't involve too much of head-work. And after all the time I had spent practising trying to solve countless other evasive problems, this was a piece of cake. And so I started on it and was done with the algorithm in 15 mins and the program was ready in another half hour. I still couldn't believe that she had given us such an easy problem. There were a few others like me who had finished their programs as well, so the examiner added on a few more questions onto the main question and we were tasked with completing that. I was asked to count the number of unique prime numbers in the matrix, enabling which took some time. The "unique" bit was the hardest to get right. In spite of all this we finished the exam inside 2 hours and got out.

Thus the earlier speculation of our imminent deaths was transferred to the next batch of lambs. And we added to their stress by suggesting that they might get a question involving both files and structures [both individually considered grave makers, but taken together the prospect was even more terrifying]. And thus the chapter of this subject draws to a close and now we await the real test in the form of our EC (Electronic Circuits) Lab Practical. Now I take my leave to go prepare my grave.

P. S. It seems the next batch was spared as well. We'll just have to wait until tomorrow to know the rest of the story. :)