A Crude Measure of BITSGian Stupidity

19 Dec 2012 In my first year at BITS, seniors constantly derided our batch as being stupid. We did it to our immediate juniors, the 2010 batch. I don't know what we thought of the 2011 and 2012 batches. Either we stopped caring, or they weren't stupid. While I do remember that '08 thought '10 was stupid as well, there were these other theories that stupidity alternates between batches at BITS?. I was always interested in problems like the stupidity of a whole batch. Before leaving college, I ran a python script to check for really, really stupid username-password cominations for the BITSnet proxy authentication, hoping to get a really terrible indicator of stupidity, expecting to find nothing. The passwords I checked for were egregiously bad- like 'abcdef' and 'password', fifty-five of them in total. I got this graph: The line represents the percentage of the batch that keeps such passwords. As you can see, 2010 is the stupidest batch by this measure, closely followed by the soon-to-be Masters and not-so-soon-to-be Doctors of BITS-Pilani K.K Birla :deepbreath: Goa Campus. What surprised me even more that my script got no (nil, zero, nada) hits for the '12 batch. I even ran it again. It's incredible (looking at their seniors, of course), but nobody from the 2012 batch kept passwords from my list. Good for you, kids!

1: This 'Alternating Stupidity' theory was probably floated by the '09 batch. The '09 batch thinks '08 is stupid as well. The '09 batch actually thinks of itself as very smart and will give you facts to back it up too. I don't know what the batches from '10 onward think of each other, except that '12 thinks of itself as very smart and thinks '11 is very stupid.