By Joseph Varghese/Staff Reporter

In a radical shift from its traditional methods of examination, India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is ushering in a revolution in the form of Open Text-Based Assessment (OTBA) system from March 2014. The new pattern will be implemented by all Indian schools in Qatar from this academic year.
The move is aimed at ridding the schools of the twin problems of students being forced to learn by rote and cheating during examinations as students will be provided questions-related materials in the examination halls.
Indian schools in Qatar confirmed that they have received the necessary materials and model questions for the summative examination to be held in March 2014. The assessment in its pilot phase is introduced in class IX and XI during this academic year.
Gulf Times had, earlier this year, reported the proposal of CBSE to implement the OBTA system in some of the classes from this academic year. CBSE has sent detailed materials and sample questions to all CBSE schools in India and abroad so that the concerned teachers “could read, discuss and analyse” it. CBSE officials suggest that the focus of teachers regarding OTBA content must be to understand its objectives and outcomes.
Welcoming the move, A K Shrivastava, chairman of the Council of CBSE affiliated schools in the Gulf and principal of Birla Public School, said that the school has received materials necessary for the examination and uploaded them on the website.
He said: “This a great move forward in enabling the students to face the examinations with better understanding. I have personally verified the materials and they are excellent and provide the students with opportunities for self-expression and challenging themselves. The model questions sent by CBSE are also very competitive.”
MES Indian School principal A P Sasidharan said his school has also received the relevant materials which have been supplied to the concerned classes. “The materials are connected to the smart board of each class and students can access them easily. This will help the students to access and get trained in the
relevant fields,” he added.
To begin with, OTBA will be conducted only for classes IX and XI as part of the final exams in March. For class IX, the OTBA material has been released for all main subjects including English, Hindi, Mathematics, Science and Social Science. For class XI, the text material is for Geography, Economics and Biology. OTBA will be applicable only to these subjects this year. Each school will have to prepare its own question paper and text material will be made available to students inside exam hall for reference.
CBSE has also reworked the marks distribution to accommodate OTBA scores in the main subject marks itself. The question papers in main subjects at Summative Assessment II will be of 90 marks except English. English examination will be of 70 marks with 20 marks for assessment of speaking and listening skills. The question paper in each main subject will have a separate section of 10 marks for OTBA. The OTBA section will comprise text material accompanied by two or three questions based on this text.
CBSE chairman Vineet Joshi had earlier said: “OTBA will have questions of higher order thinking skills (HOTS) and some of which may be subjective, creative and open-ended”.
He also had said that textual material will be related to chosen concepts taken from the syllabi. The content given to students 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 students during second semester.
The text material for each subject is between 12-18 pages inclusive of diagrams and illustrations. Text material for each subject has themes not only related to existing syllabi, but also recent events. For example, the Uttarakhand tragedy (devastating floods) is discussed for the theme ‘environment and development’. The theme in mathematics discusses about area and distance through planning of a garden layout.