COIMBATORE: A high-level committee formed by the All India Council for Technical Education has come out with its recommendation on examination reforms for technical education institutions. One of the key recommendations is the introduction of ‘open textbook examination’ on chosen courses or curriculum areas.The traditional written examinations have a significant weakness -- a tendency to encourage rote learning and more superficial application of knowledge. This deficiency can be overcome by ‘open book examination’, the committee said in its report.
Open book examination is similar to time-constrained written examinations but designed in a way that allows students to refer to either class notes, textbooks, or other approved material while answering questions. They are particularly useful if you want to test skills in application, analysis and evaluation, i.e. higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.
The advantages of the open textbook examination are less demanding on memory and hence less stressful; questions can emphasise more on problem-solving, application of knowledge and higher order thinking rather than simple recall of facts and assessment; questions can also reflect real life situations that require comprehension, information retrieval and synthesising skills of the students to solve, the committee said.
Commenting on the idea, E Balagurusamy, former vice-chancellor of Anna University said, “Open textbook examination is not a great idea to test application knowledge of a student. The key for success of such examination lies on question paper setting. The question paper should be set in such a way that the student cannot lift the answer directly from the book; it should ensure that they apply their knowledge to answer the question.”
AICTE had formed a high level committee headed by Ashok S Shetter, vice-chancellor of KLE Technological University in Karnataka, to come out with its recommendation on examination reforms. The committee has submitted its recommendation and AICTE has sought comments and suggestions on it by August 20.