Open book tests

Now the new Education Minister of Karnataka has come up with a new idea. He has brought about a change in the examination system. Here is an attempt at a short translation of the assessment system called Open Book Tests.

What is an open book test?

"Open book assessment" implies that examinees are permitted to counsel their class notes, course readings, and other endorsed materials while addressing the inquiries. This practice is unusual in legal practices but in other matters, it is not often heard. Although this idea may sound basic and confusing to those used to traditional tests, it is particularly well suited to programs that teach critical and creative thinking skills. It aims to develop.

Is teaching a transfer of information?

To see the value in the benefits of open-book assessments, understanding the idea of showing programs, in general, is first fundamental. Many people think that the central goal of school and university teaching is the "dissemination of knowledge". This method of education treats one subject as the most important. The teacher's role is seen as facilitating the transfer of information from the textbook to the students' minds. Understanding this information, retaining it, and retrieving it during the final exam is what the student is expected to do.

Based on the above approach, traditional tests test how much information students can store in their minds. To cope with this demand, students memorize information in-class notes and textbooks and transfer it to answer books during exams. In this type of test, success depends on the amount of information remembered and the ability to reproduce it.

Teaching as stimulating psychological development

An alternative view is that teaching should not transfer information from libraries or textbooks to students' minds. Rather, real teaching is about how students learn. That is, the ability to acquire knowledge, modify existing knowledge based on a new experience, construct new knowledge and apply knowledge to solve problems and make intelligent decisions should equip students with teaching. Education is not a matter of requiring a degree, but the lifelong process of mental development does not end at any degree.

If we accept this view of education, the main focus of teaching is on the skills of acquiring, modifying, and creating knowledge rather than on the content of information. In other words, the focus shifts from rote learning to the development of some psychological tutors.

The task of the teacher is not to summarize the information in the textbook but to ensure an environment that stimulates the development of this creative and critical personnel. This can be done by motivating and guiding learning by providing feedback, criticism, and other feedback by enabling learning through questions, projects, assignments, and more.

A good analogy for such an approach is a physical education program that aims to develop students' physical strength, stamina, and flexibility. Using this example, it can be said that subjects taught in high school or university should aim to develop students' intellectual ability, intellectual stamina, and intellectual flexibility.

Experiential learning & inquiry learning skills.

What types of tests are most appropriate for this type of educational program? Clearly, traditional memory test tests should give way to tests that test students' intellectual skills. Here come the open book tests.

If the purpose of the test is to test students' memorization of information, open-book tests are inappropriate, as students can easily transfer this information to the test paper in the textbook or lecture notes. "Who invented the theory of relativity?", define the term "standard deviation", or Suppose the test contains questions based on information such as "Write an essay on the main structural features of Old English". Students can easily find answers in textbooks or notes, and copy them into their answer books.

On the other hand, if the test tests problem solving and critical thinking skills, there is no harm in students discussing their textbooks and class notes. If students were to evaluate a conclusion that decisively involved the concept of critical deviation, the textbook would reproduce it as pointless. Similarly, when given a sentence in Old English and asked specific indirect questions to understand the structural characteristics of Old English, students cannot simply copy something from the textbook.

In an open-book exam, it is pointless to ask questions like "Define the concept 'molecule'", because all the student has to do is copy directly from the textbook into the answer book. In a closed book test, the student first copies the information from their memory from the textbook and then copies it into the answer book. This is a reminder of the intermediate stage when open-book exams try to get rid of. Due to the availability of textbooks in the examination room, teachers do not ask questions that require the mere transfer of information from the textbook to the test book.

Nonverbal, indirect problem-solving questions can be used in closed-book tests to test students' thinking skills. So one might be tempted to argue that what matters is designing the right kind of questions rather than preparing open-book tests. But this can be an argument for living with the conflict rather than resolving it. The essential difference between closed-book tests and open-book tests is that the former can still be used to evaluate how well students remember, while the latter cannot. If we are not interested in testing memorized information, why use closed-book tests?

I am not suggesting that value in education has no value. Allow us to recognize aloof and static memory engaged with repetition gaining from dynamic and dynamic memory engaged with getting to memory as a component of innovative and decisive reasoning. Imagine what it would be like to memorize a few sentences from a foreign language without knowing their meanings. With a little effort, this task can be accomplished. But it involves mechanical memory. In contrast, consider the kind of memory a statesman needs to think through a social or political issue. Situations require the mind to simultaneously focus, view them from different angles, make connections, and draw conclusions. The kind of memory required for this purpose is not encouraged by rote learning. Since open-book tests are not suitable for testing rote learning, they can be utilized successfully to prepare understudies for the utilization of dynamic memory.

There are two sorts of open-book tests

One can think of two types of open-book tests, say the restricted type and unrestricted type. In limited open-book tests, understudies are allowed to bring at least one explicit report supported by the course educator into the test room. In open-book tests of unregulated type, students are free to come up with any type they like.

In limited open-book testing, understudies might be allowed to counsel printed archives like logarithmic tables, word references, or the total works of Shakespeare, however, no transcribed material or printed reports are first endorsed. Students should ensure that the printed documents brought by them do not have any scribbles in the margins. In this type of examination, approved documents serve more or less as appendices to the question paper. These tests are not completely different from closed-book tests. Apart from the course format, they do not present any special problems.

As I mentioned before, there are no restrictions on what students can bring in an unrestricted open book exam. They can bring any books (with or without scribbles in the margins), course instructor's lecture manuals, or their own handwritten notes. The use of such tests suggests certain teaching strategies and types of questions. Specifically, the course focuses on a set of intellectual skills rather than informational content, and it requires that no content-based questions be asked in the exam.

If the course instructor is focused on imparting currently available knowledge and the question paper contains traditional content-based questions such as "Write an essay on the differences between British and American English," the use of arbitrary open-book tests is detrimental. Instead, when used correctly, it is pointless to have students take arbitrary open-book tests on whatever material they have brought because the answers will be designed in such a way that they cannot be found in textbooks, handouts, or class notes. An intelligent student who has experience in such examinations will have no difficulty in bringing something to the next examination Because they will know that they (the things produced) are of no use. The use of these tests then acts as a symbolic gesture that makes students aware of the nature of the course and tests, and shocks them into a way of studying that does not involve failure.