Harsh Ketkar and Arnab Pal of VIT won the Telecom GrandMasters Quiz organised by Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management on 5th Aug 2005. Here's what Harsh has to say:
Telecom GrandMasters Quiz was a national level Business quiz, with over 600 participants taking part, corporates and students alike, in the written eliminations round. Five teams were selected; two corporate teams and three student teams. The corporate teams were from Computer Associates, Bangalore; and from Avaya Software, Pune. The other student teams were ICFAI Business School, Hyderabad; and Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies, Pune. Our team from VIT was the only undergraduate and engineering college team.
The questions were mostly easy. Some were repeated, but the easy nature was compensated for by the buzzer and rapid-fire rounds. I'd give it a 6/10 on the toughness level. Plus there was a crossword round, and a gambling round, where you had to play for 10 or 20 points, and lose 5 or 10 for the wrong answer. At least two rounds had negative marking. We fared a bit badly in the logo round, and the B-school blokes were good at that. But the others were okay. We managed to lead all the way through, in the end the difference between us and the number two team narrowed down to 25 points, from a peak of around 50 points.
One more thing: those SITM guys pamper you like as if you are competing for a gold medal at the Olympics. We were kept in a VIP room just before the quiz, served water, and a volunteer took care of our baggage. On stage, there was a bottle of Aquafina, two glasses, and a bowl full of toffees. After the quiz, they had arranged for snacks; chicken sandwiches, pastries (Pineapple and Black Forest), coffee, tea, wafers and cheese sandwiches. One hell of an ego massage!
Harsh Ketkar
3 comments:
Who was the quizmaster?
The entire SITM quiz was a massive fraud... Not a single standard Team qualified.. Ever heard of teams from Computer Associates, Bangalore or Avaya Software, Pune, even qualifying in any National Level Quiz.
3 out of 5 teams, after 19 Rounds of Online Prelims, are from PUNE. Surely Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai have better Quizzers and deserve Better.
SITM didn't display the ANSWERS or reveal the SCORE. The point is how can you select 5 teams after 19 rounds of Prelims. How are the 19 Prelims to be judged based on their relative degree of Difficulty.
There were Questions like " How many Stomach does a Cow Have".. Gosh even Derek's Bournvita Quiz has a higher Standard...!!
It is well advised to stay away from such Ponzi Quizzes where the Intent is to collect Money. After Payin Rs350/ a piece, at least the answers & scores should have been displayed.
The Online Prelims, conducted at The DirectWay centres had problems during Login, quizzers got logged Midway and had to be logged in multiple times. SITM could have done better by taking offline Prelims on a single day at different cities concurrently.
it would be so much better if you guys identified yourself - your comments would be lent a whole lot more of credibility then. The Symbi guys would also take your comments more seriously in that case - maybe leading to an improvement next year...
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