AICTE Planning to Introduce Open-Book Exams for Engineering Students

With an aim to regulate rote learning and give emphasis to analytical abilities of students, a four-member panel on exam reform has recommended an ‘open book exam’ for engineering courses. The panel, which was constituted in January 2018, has submitted its report on the exam reforms and other recommendations to AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education).

At present, the report is being examined by AICTE and HRD Ministry, and the final decision on the implementation of the open-book exam will be taken soon. If the recommendation made by the exam reform panel is accepted, engineering education in the country will witness a massive change.

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Open book exams will allow students to carry textbooks, notes and other learning resources/ materials into the examination hall. While answering questions, students can refer the material and can make a critical analysis of the topic.

Even though experts welcomed the move, they cautioned that such reforms must be implemented with a proper care. In other words, exam reforms can’t be done in isolation, and such reforms must go with teaching reforms.

The concept of open book exams has been proposed by the four-member committee to overcome the deficiencies of traditional written examinations.

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Some of the other recommendations made by the four-member committee are: -

• Devising question papers at different levels of difficulty in line with the varied capabilities of students.
• Bloom’s taxonomy framework must be taken into consideration to set the question papers. Usually, such question papers are well balanced and test the cognitive skills of the students. The difficulty level of these question papers will be moderate.
• The weightage of various cognitive levels in the exam papers can vary from course to course.
• There is a need to introduce a wide range of assessment methods to match the learning outcomes.

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