Three pieces of advice.

1) Write some shitty CRUD app in C# for school, and write your scheme interpreter just for fun. Don't waste your time fighting with a prof, just play the game and move on.

2) Add README files to your github projects. Some prospective employers will ignore your grades/cv and browse your github - readme files will help them.

Put the scheme interpreter here too, even if it's just a fun little project.

2) When you are looking for a job, send me an email. I'm CTO at a startup based out of Pune and NY. When you graduate we'll either be hiring or bankrupt, and in the former case we probably want to talk to you (see point 2).

Sound advice. Everyone has been telling me that, so maybe I should start listening ;)

Thanks for the offer. I'll keep you in mind when I'm looking for a job next year.

Buddy, I completely understand your pain.

I did my engineering at NIT (it was called REC when I graduated) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Technolo...] and I also suffered in first two semesters because I did not play the game which others were playing just to get good grades. The focus was on grades, not learning.

Later I realized that playing game of grades is not much of an effort so why not play the game and keep doing what I love to do on the side? In my final year, I was in Top 10 students in my batch. In last two years of college, I also did freelance coding for some clients in USA which helped me pay for all my expenses (tuition/pocket money/party/vacation). When college was over and it was time to face the real world, everyone who only focused on the grades suffered and I aced the interviews, found a job which I loved and finally moved to USA.

Read patio11's career advice: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

For a example which you can relate to, see Swaroop [http://www.swaroopch.com/]. He didn't graduate from IIT but worked for Yahoo, Adobe, some Internet startup and he is finally doing freelancing and recently did some work for Joshua [http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/freelancing-for-joshua-schacht...]. He doesn't even mention his degree on his blog, he lets his work speak for itself.

So don't get discouraged, play the game but focus on your passion. Everything else will fall in place. If you want to talk, feel free to contact me. [My info is in my profile.]

> Later I realized that playing game of grades is not much of an effort so why not play the game and keep doing what I love to do on the side?

That's what I do most of the time. It's just that this once, I went a little too far and took on a task that's going to be more difficult than usual to explain to my profs.

Ah well. It's IPU. Failing at a project or practical exam is impossible here. The worst that can happen is that I score a 70 while everyone else scores a 90. I'm beyond caring at this point.

Maybe, but in this specific story, the claim is that a teacher first says it's OK, that the student followed the marking criteria he was given, that the teacher during the course of the project still said it was OK and that then, at grading time, the teacher turned around completely and all of a sudden said that he didn't understand anything about it, and therefore had to fail the student.

Many dysfunctional examples from systems across the world notwithstanding, this particular one doesn't pass the sniff test.

This sounds like a perfect case study for Patrick's advice about awesome points.

For school: just do the work that will get you the good grades, no matter how tedious it is.

For home: hey, that's when you do the Steam Interpreter.