Extra 30 minutes for class IX and XI students as part of CBSE’s Open book examination

Students of classes 9 and 11 in CBSE schools can yet again heave a sigh of relief, as CBSE with an aim to make exams a little more stress free has decided to give them extra time in their March 2014 final exams .Central Board of Secondary Education will give an additional 30 minutes to attempt the Open Text Based Assessment (OTBA) section introduced for the 2014-15 academic session.This will be in addition to the extra 15 minutes given before attempting the paper.
The Open Text Based Assessment (OTBA) will debut in March 2014 as a separate section within the main question paper. The OTBA questions will be addition to the original number questions as per last year’s pattern, hence the central board has decided to allow an extra half-hour to students.

READ PUBLIC ANNOUCEMENT- CLICK HERE

In the month of June, CBSE had made an announcement to introduce the open book examination system for classes 9 and 11 with the aim of strengthening students’ analytical and theoretical skills.With this concept, CBSE also plans to completely do away with rote learning thereby reducing the burden of ‘mugging’ up and aims at enabling the development of higher order skills such as information processing, analysis, inference and the like. KNOW MORE

How will the exam be conducted?

• OTBA only for Class IX and XI
• OTBA will be part of Summative Assessment – II
• The OTBA question paper will have a maximum of three questions
• Each school will have to prepare its own question paper
• Text material will also be made available to students in the exam hall for reference

Highlights about the Open Text based Assessment (OTBA):

• It will be applicable to all the main subjects for students in class IX; for class XI it will be applicable only to Economics, Biology and Geography.
• This will be a part of Summative Assessment II to be held in March, 2014.
• The schools will be supplied with the study material a few months before the commencement of Summative Assessment II.
• The 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.
• It will be to the extent of 15-20 percent in all the main subjects and may also include the Value Based Questions
• The text material will be related to chosen concepts taken from the syllabi and will be about 14-18 pages long for each subject
• The Open Text based Assessment (OTBA) will have questions about higher order thinking skills and some of which may be subjective, creative and open ended.
• The textual material supplied earlier will be printed again as part of the question paper and thus will be available while answering the questions.

So students do you think Open text based assessment system is a good move? How helpful is an open book exam in building our focus to test ourselves?? Share your views and ideas in this as comments below.

All the best
Team Meritnation