At the start of the new academic year, Sehwag University’s School of Business was facing lots of problems (in terms of student discipline). More than half of the students were not attending classes. Dean Prof. Santrupt Dandewala Saaheb was looking at ways of improving the classroom attendance. As a solution, he decided on testing the concept of open air classrooms.

Hence, the school started having open air classes in this new academic year. It was based on pilot programmes on Planet Jupiter. The experiment found that plenty of fresh air and open spaced classrooms allowed children to recover quickly from diseases. While students knew the multiple diseases other MBA students were having … but they were wondering about the diseases they were infected with!

The term I open air lectures were happening peacefully. Attendance also improved. Financial Accounting course was going fine. For a change, Accounting Guru, Prof. Rockstar Swamiji was teaching the course. One fine day, Swamiji announced a surprise quiz. Students had to rate each of the four firms (Blue Dart Express, Colgate Palmolive India, Infosys Technologies, and Raymond) based on their three financial statements (in terms of their chances of going bankrupt). Being environment conscious and to save on paper, Swamiji pasted the three financial statements for the latest period of these four companies on a nearby wall.

Just before the start of the class, a few hungry cows entered the School of Business Campus and walked into the open air classroom. Swamiji was quite impressed that they also wanted to learn Financial Accounting from him. Before the students (and Swamiji) could do anything, the hungry cows ate a few papers pasted on the wall, i.e., the balance sheet and income statement portion of all these four companies. Swamiji was adamant on the surprise quiz to be done. So, he asked the students to rate these four companies based on their ‘statement of cash flow’ alone.

Based on the ‘statement of cash flow’ alone, please rate these four companies on a scale of 1 to 10. Where a rating of ‘10’ would indicate ‘Excellent cash flow (very few problems)’ and ‘1’ would indicate the other way round. Please also defend your responses by mentioning the overall assessment on each company within 100 words each.

This incident prompted the Dean Prof. Santrupt Dandewala Saaheb to softly close the open air classroom experiment for good.