Schools Start Prepping Their Students for CBSE’s OTBA Exam in Much Advance

The city schools have already begun training and prepping the students for the Open Text-Based Assessment (OTBA) exam, for which Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) issued circulars to start with this first and one of its kind exam within few months.

Class IX and XI CBSE students shall have a 10-mark section based OTBA in their yearly exams to be held in March 2014. The aim of introduction of this type of exam by CBSE is to test 'higher order thinking skills' of students.
The Study materials and resources on selected topics in subjects of English, social sciences, Hindi and maths have been released by now.

This shall be the first round of the pilot project that will consist open-ended and application-based questions, they will be framed and asked only from the material provided.
As mentioned in the circular issued by CBSE, the students are not permitted to bring their own study material to the examination hall. Invigilators and Teachers have been told to check the study material that will be provided and accordingly assign similar open-ended questions to exam takers for further discussions.

The general Idea of introducing OBTA is a putting a foot forward to eradicate the practice of ‘rote learning’ that many students exercise.
Some are keenly waiting to observe how this OTBA experimental project goes, before calling it a 'revolutionary' change in the CBSE education system.
Principal of Gitanjali School , Maya Sukumaran, told that this first experimental phase of OTBA might be more difficult than current pattern of taking exams and patience need to take on to view how it went, before planning to apply this exam on various other subjects on a large scale.