The Users of this product will be IITK Students (and possibly ICS affiliated mentors and counsellors). To understand why this product would be useful to them, we need to understand the IITK course allotment system in depth:

IITK has a uniquely flexible academic programme, allowing students to customize their degree with the courses that they see fit for their academic journey. Students have the freedom to choose whichever course they like, and add it to their programme. For example, if you are pursuing a degree in Mathematics, and you intend to apply the math to an economic context, IITK would allow you to add courses from the economics department to your template, better equiping you for the career you desire.

To add some structure to the programme, students are highly recommended to follow a standard template, which includes some compulsory courses and some electives where we can choose which course to enroll in. In the 1st and 2nd years there aren’t many elective slots as we are taught the basics of the degree we are pursuing, but in the later years the electives become the majority of the template.

• Eg- My Degree Template

An important point to note is that the template is a recommendation. You can easily drop any courses in the template, even the compulsory ones. So, what if a maths guy decides to only select chemistry courses? Awarding him a major in mathematics would be wrong. How does the institute determine whether a student has chosen a path that is ‘maths enough’ to be awarded a major in maths?

Well, each course has a credit score (that represents the intensity of the course) and a type:

• IC - Institute Compulsory courses to be done by all branches
• DC - Department Compulsory
• DE - Department Elective (can choose any course offered by the department)
• OE - Open Electives courses, from other departments
• ESO, SCHEME- Other compulsory course types

By the end of your programme, you must have completed all the compulsory courses and have selected your courses in such a way that the sum of their credits come in the allowable credit range for each type of course. If you are lacking any credit, you will not be allowed to graduate (and you’ll have to stay another semester).

• The Credit Table for maths:

This system allows students to have an interdisciplinary education in a structured way. The best example of this is getting a minor degree alongside your major, by selecting your courses in a strategic way to satisfy the rules for being granted a minor.

• Ex- To get a minor in Aerospace engineering, the student must do AE201 and any 3 from the 4 options available.
• Ex- The requirements for some minors may be very flexible

In theory, its gives students academic freedom, as long as you plan out the sequence of courses you are going to take, keeping the pre-requisites of each course you intend to study in mind.

In practice, 3 main issues make course planning at IITK difficult for students.

Firstly (and most importantly) there is much uncertainty in the planning process. This is mainly due to time table clashes (the course timings clash with those of other courses you are taking in that semester) that we only get to know about for the coming semester as the timings are released only one semester in advance by the institute.

• This are some snips from a whatsapp group of maths students, deciding which DE to take in the 5th semester