A teaching institute is assessed from multiple aspects. One of them is the teacher-student ratio. Higher the ratio, better the teaching status of the institute. It is obvious that if there are fewer students for a teacher to teach, he will be able to give better attention to the students and the learning process for the students will be enhanced. from this point of view, the medical council and the health university make it mandatory that for postgraduate teaching, the teacher-student ratio should be one, i.e. for each student there should be one teacher, or a teacher should not have more than one student. It is not so for undergraduate teaching. While we get 16 postgraduate students per year, we get 180 undergraduate students per year. The number of teachers remaining the same, the ratio cannot be 1 for undergraduates. For clinical postings, they put less than 10 students per unit if there are 6 teaching units in the hospital.
But my students achieved the seemingly impossible. The other day, when the civic body elections were held, only one student turned up for education, the others preferring to stay home rather than go vote or get educated. So our teacher-student ratio became one. And then a day came when they achieved the impossible - they made the ratio infinity. No student turned up for education. The ratio being number of teachers divided by the number of students and the number of students being zero, the ratio became infinity. The mathematical explanation for those who have not studied maths is that any number divided by zero gives the answer as infinity. Ours is probably the only institute on record with such a ratio. Perhaps we could apply to the Guinness book of world record! :-)
