Structured Creativity!

Oh i am back. As my orkut status reads, term 4 in IIM Calcutta is really screwing me. Lots of projects, quizzes, portfolios to manage, endterms looming over(just a day left). Amongst all this frustration, drama and jugaad there are some creative and lighter moments which while screwing you one side, still manages to bring a laugh or smile on your face by the sheer uniqueness and brilliance of it.

One such hillarious thing is our tryst with a course called Structured Finance in the term 4 of our MBA. This was one of the few courses which didnot have a cap or cutoff grade. For the uninitiated, cap in a subject means the professor has set a predefined maximum intake (Eg. 50 students) and cutoff grade meant u needed a minimum of B+ in a few related courses to opt for the course . So this subject was opted for by a whooping 144 students in the batch. There were two tranches of people who had opted for this subject. One lets call it T1, who were really focussed on finance, specifically markets and had come to know from the seniors that he is one of the best visiting professors taking a finance course in IIMC. The other T2, were guys who were having a mixed bag portfolio of subjects. They were looking to take one FIN course and Struct Fin seemed a good and easier option since it dinot have a cap or a grade barrier.

And here comes Prof. VK, the securitization stud who teaches at a level which needs atleast some basic knowledge about bonds, fixed income, options etc. Most of the T2 and some of T1 were in for a shock and had given up on the subject in in the 3rd,4th classes itself. The classes were conducted on the Saturday mornings which was the worst time to go to a class. All this culminated into an indifference on the part of many students towards the subjects and many had made it a habit to sign the attendance sheet and leave the class. The professor dint care about it in the first few classes but started getting frustrated slowly. And then he thought enough is enough.He had his own way of vendatta. He started conducting quizzes in the last 5 minutes of the class when atleast half of the class had left after the ritual of signing the attendance sheet.

Quiz 1: He started with the first quiz. With just 5 mins left for the class to end he asks the students to take a sheet of paper out of their books write their names and reg nos and answer a few SIMPLE questions. People still couldnt believe that they were actualy going to write a quiz. Before anyone could even react to what happened the quiz was over. Half the class was literally RAPED since they just missed a quiz which had 5 marks weightage ( 5 marks really matters here since you might lose or gain a grain for even 0.5 marks).

Quiz 2: The same event happened 2-3 classes later in the last 5 mins of the class. This time people were accustomed to the surprise if not prepared for it. Some of them managed to call their friends who had already left to rush in time to attend the quiz. This time it was more interesting. This was like a real Quiz Quiz. We had to guess the word or the concept which you could decipher from a cryptic statement. There were 15 suchs.
One interesting one was:
"It goes well with bed, bread and bonds!"
The answer was: Spread
There were many nore such interesting hillarious cryptics. One was relating "wardrobe malfunction" and CDOs, can you beat this for creativity.(Answer was Ramp up Risk:). We managed to survive this one too

Quiz 3: By now we were like anticipating a quiz almost every class. Risk averse people slowly stopped leaving the class after the ritual while the risky guys left and had someone in the class who would buzz them if at all the quiz happened. The creativity levels in setting the quiz was growing exponentially. I was wondering if the Prof had a split personality - one which was a hardcore FIN focused securitization God and the other was a Creative and Art oriented person.
Ok without deviating from the topic lets go bang onto the quiz. This one was a Yes/No or True/False type quiz. We were a bit happy that we dint have to write paragraphs like we did in Quiz 1 or concepts like we did in Quiz 2. This was merely a Yes/No one but no it was not to be cake walk. In the quiz we actually had to write if each of the 10 topics which he gave was taught in the class or not! If yes we had to write a line on it. It has negative marking too. There were people rushing in in the middle of the quiz. Yes the buzzers haddone their job. The vendatta part of this quiz was that if u didnot attend the classes properly you wouldnot have any clue what he had taught even if you learnt it on your own. The funniest thing was when we came to know that all the anwers were "No" i.e the Prof hadnt taught any of the 10 topics in the class!!

Quiz 4: This was an encounter that i faced just today. As usual the Saturday morning blues. Again the last 5 mins quiz. Here ended the routine or stereotype. The CQ(Creative Quotient) was hitting the roof. This quiz was the randomest of all. We had to write as many one-liners, punch lines or Rajini type "Oru dadavai sonna nooru dadavai sonna madiri" one -line punches. This happened when is was my frustrated best because of Struct Fin. Still i managed to rack my brains and come out with some some bizzare and few horny ones
Some of them were as below:
SPV(Special Purpose Vehicles) are like pimps!!
In securitization, there are many friends who want to share your joys and sorrows.
REITs(Real Estate Investment Trusts) are like beehives. Each hole is a unit in it and every bee(read investor) has a right on the hive. The bees provide honey to the beehive(read investment)

And thus ended our last class on Structured Finance!!

This professor is so much into securitization that he even made 2 different tranches or classes(exams) during our end terms. One was a low risk moderate return, a written test. The other one was a high risk high return class which was a excel based spreadsheet exam. Even the evaluation was weird as he came up with his own Beta( scaling factor) for the risky tranche.
We manged to make him realize that he was playing securitization games with our Grades and got our End term de-securitized.

I hope i maximize my returns in the End Term exam..

PS: Pardon me for the highly loaded Finance jargon. The theme of the post needed it to be so..