So What is a trimester?
Trimester refers to one term of study in IPM. I am sure you must have heard about the semester system that most of the colleges follow. So, a semester is when you divide the yearly course load in 2 equal half calling every half a trimester. In contrast, a trimester is. When you divide the yearly courseload into three equal parts. Most of the B-schools in India follow a trimester system instead of a semester. Each year has 3 terms, so overall IPM has 5 x 3=15 terms.
How does a usual term in IPM look like?
Each trimester we IPMers have to complete a course load of 31-33 credits(where 1 credit= 5 classes of 75 min. each). A usual length of 1 term is 2.5-3 months. A term usually has a mid-term week (usually after the first month from the start of term) and an end-term week. You might have quizzes in between the exams as well. The number of exams(including mid-term,end-term, quizzes) and project submission(group and individual) vary from subject to subject. There are subjects where you won’t have any exams and only presentations, and then there are subjects where you can have 4 assignments,2 quizzes and 2 exams.It depends on the professor how he wants the grading to be.
How many holidays?
There is typically a 10-15 day off between any 2 terms. Apart from this, we have 45 days off between 1st and 2nd year and a 3 month off between 3rd and 4th year(although most students do an internship in that period, but that is optional). The gap between 2nd to 3rd and 4th to 5th year is filled with social and summer internship, respectively.
Apart from this, every Thursday is a holiday, and every Sunday is a half-day(2 classes only). But be aware, we still have exams on Thursdays as well, IPM is hard you see 🙂
Attendance?
IPM follows a 80% attendance criteria in every subject. If you miss a single class below 80% you will have a grade cut of 0.25 per every class missed.Apart from this you can not have a re-exam unless there is a medical case.
Grading?
IPM follows relative grading. Realtive grading means that your absolute marks don’t matter. What matters is how well you have performed in the batch & where do you stand.
The grading is done on a scale of 0 to 4.33
The grading scale is as follows-
The following percentage of people might get these grades –
The IPM manual states the minimum and maximum percentage of people that can get the following grades,rest depends on the professor how he/she wants the grading to be.
