EDITORIAL 2: CBSE plans open book exams
Context
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will introduce open-book assessments (OBE) in Class 9 from 2026-27, after a pilot study showed strong teacher support for the idea.
What are open-book exams?
- An open-book exam allows students to use approved resources like textbooks, class notes, or other specified material during an assessment, rather than mainly testing memory.
- The challenge lies in knowing where to look, making sense of the material, and applying it to the problem at hand. In a science paper, for instance, the facts might be in front of you, but the real test is linking them together to reach a conclusion.
- These exams evaluate whether students can interpret ideas effectively, instead of just repeating them.
History of the OBE format worldwide
- Open-book exams have been around for decades. In fact, Hong Kong introduced them as early as 1953.
- Many colleges and universities, such as Harvard and Stanford, use open book exams in courses like law, medicine, and business to test application and reasoning rather than rote learning.
- Open book exams are common in Australian universities, especially in law and health sciences, where students need to apply laws or guidelines to complex scenarios.
The importance
- It found that many students spent only 10 to 15 minutes reading the questions and locating material, usually starting with the instructor’s handouts before moving to one or two textbooks.
- Some condensed the lecturer’s notes or borrowed “worked-example” books to navigate the paper.
- Between 1951 and 1978, studies in the US and the UK allowed textbooks, notebooks and lecture notes in open-book trials.
- They used formats ranging from short answers to multiple-choice and essays across different university courses.
- The overall findings of these open-book exams were largely the same with a positive impact on internalization rather than memorisation.
- Weaker students did better in open-book examinations and were found to measure different abilities from those measured in traditional examinations.
- During Covid-19 pandemic, as universities shifted online, many introduced open-book, open-note or even open-web exams.
- Many students struggled initially — not because of the subject matter, but because they were not familiar with the format.
Is OBE a new concept in India?
- Not really. In 2014, CBSE launched the Open Text-Based Assessment (OTBA) to steer students away from rote learning.
- It applied to Class 9 for Hindi, English, Mathematics, Science and Social Science, and to Class 11 final exams for subjects like Economics, Biology and Geography. Students were given reference material four months in advance.
- But by 2017-18, CBSE dropped the initiative, concluding it had not succeeded in developing the “critical abilities” it was meant to promote.
- Open-book formats have a stronger presence in collegiate education. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) approved their use in engineering colleges in 2019 after an expert panel’s recommendation.
- During the pandemic, Delhi University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Aligarh Muslim University used OBEs, while IIT Delhi, IIT Indore and IIT Bombay ran them online.
- More recently, Kerala’s higher education reforms commission has proposed using the format only for internal or practical exams.
Way forward
- The move is part of a larger shift in the way schools approach assessment. While the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 does not name open-book tests, it calls for moving away from rote memorisation and towards competency-based learning.
- The goal is for students to grasp concepts, understand processes, and explain how they apply them.