The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Guindy engineering college weighs radical new proposal

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Guindy engineering college weighs radical new proposal

K. Ramachandran

Open book examinations will test students' ability to solve open-ended problems

— Photo: K. Pichumani

Under the new scheme, examinations will take on a whole new meaning.

CHENNAI: If you are a postgraduate student of the College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG), you could possibly be writing some of the examinations armed with textbooks, notes and materials containing data or tables next year.

The CEG is seriously considering a proposal to introduce `open book examinations' (OBE) in select post-graduate programmes — to start with in courses that have a big design component.

Design-oriented postgraduate courses in mechanical, electrical and civil engineering are the likely subjects for the start of the radical experiment in 2005-06.

``Contrary to what people think, open book exams are more difficult to design, implement and evaluate compared to the routine closed book examinations,'' says the CEG's Dean, R. Ramaprabhu.

An open book examination, he says, will test students' ability to solve open-ended problems, each of which might have more than one solution.

Some of the critical issues that need to be addressed in an OBE system are teacher preparedness, evaluation methodology and grading.

A teacher cannot simply draw up questions and prepare a key answer set as in a closed book examination. In the open book scheme, the teacher will have to be fully prepared in a given subject to design a question paper that tests the abilities and skill levels of a student by posing different design problems.

The questions have to challenge students' understanding of a design issue, make them look at various possible answers and offer the optimal solution, keeping in mind economic viability; all this while validating his/her data and solution. Students will also be faced with the problem of deciding which book to turn to for an appropriate solution. ``It will simulate an industry situation, where a designer approximates a solution in a real life context. When an engineer in a plant or industry encounters a problem he will normally go back to the textbook, datasheets or manuals, and see whether they have an answer to the problem. This is the situation we want to simulate in a postgraduate examination,'' the Dean says.

In terms of evaluation and grading too, the examiner will have to assess the solutions offered, the data on which they are based, and then see if the solutions are validated while grading the students, Prof. Ramaprabhu points out.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Tamil Nadu