Open Book Examination

Open text based assessment / open book examination

Definition

OTBA may be defined as a process of evaluation based on examination in which text/picture/chart material etc. is supplied prior to examination and allowed to take reference from those materials while examination In India CBSE is going to conduct OTBA for ix and xii_th classes from 2014 onward.

Schools will be supplied with "textual material in a few months before the commencement of SA-ii. A textual material may be in the form of an article, a case study, a diagram, a concept/mind map, a picture or a cartoon, problem/situation based on the concepts taught to be students during second term”. Textual material will be related to chosen concepts taken from the syllabi.

"OTBA will have questions of higher order thinking skills some of which may be subjective, creative and open ended”. Students will be able to refer to that material during exam, “textual material supplied earlier will be printed again as part of the question paper and thus will be available while answering the questions".

For std. xi, the OTBA will be applicable only to economics, biology and geography. This will be part of the final exam in March. CBSE advised schools to mark the answer sheets based on four criterions.

·         First is the student's understanding and application of the concepts to the situational problems,

·         Second being ability to suggest and bring out the appropriate solutions to the problem,

·         Third is the ability to come up with innovative opinions and fourth the ability to deeply analyse, based on a wide range of perspectives.

 OTBA will comprise 15%-20% of the total marks and may also include value-based questions, which is already part of the current set up. Since std. ix comes under the continuous and comprehensive evaluation scheme, the March OTBA will be part of summative assessment-ii (SA-ii).

 How will this affect the Indian education system?

Against

The steps taken by CBSE may seem innovative but they are going so fast that Indian education system may not find hard to accept the changes

·         is teachers of Indian education system are able to properly judge the student's analysing technique, innovative opinion etc.? Judging these for common school  teachers might be a tough work

·         with already grading system and marks for practical and assessments it’s easy to score marks in fairly easy and sometimes unfair means

·         Weaker students will don't pay attention to studies.

·         for the proper assessments of students in OTBA it will requires question set to an above average level which can test the higher thinking skills of students and highly qualified teachers.

Favour

The world is advancing so our education system but with the university exam dominated by closed book, invigilated pen and paper tests, it is the need of hour to judge our students differently given the human capital needs of a knowledge economy, not just because of the absence of technology that is used routinely in everyday business and commerce, but because this type of examination instrument is incompatible with constructivist learning theory that favours deep learning. It is further argued that a commitment to authentic assessment will pave the way for a different type of final examination, where real-world problems are allowed to take Centre-stage, and multi-media can be harnessed to provide the learner with a more engaging experience.

With greater engagement, this, in turn, can yield better results in terms of the depth of student learning. An on-going research project with an open book, open web examination format at u21global has yielded Positive results in terms of student perceptions of this examination instrument compared to the Invigilated, closed book type exam. Importantly, OTBA is a transferable model that can just as easily be administered in an on campus setting as online, and while there will always be a small number of students who will cheat, the main priority should be to focus on the higher quality learning outcomes of the majority, rather than set up an entire system to stop a small minority. Certainly, if there is roughly equal Scope for cheating (as the results of two student surveys would seem to suggest) then it would make sense to opt for the model that maximises student learning.A limitation of this study involves the methodological considerations pertaining to measurement issues, Sampling units, and the number of variables investigated in this study. Subsequently, this limits the generalizability of the findings reported. Hence, replications with more representative samples of respondents and extensions of measurement scales are planned for the future.

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