DILEMMA OF OPEN BOOK EXAMINATION STUDENTS

DILEMMA OF OPEN BOOK EXAMINATION STUDENTS

Do you all remember your school time examinations and that one little nasty kid who would swear to death for not cheating? Well, we all had that classmate right? They would spill out big words such as – ‘ethics‘, ‘honesty‘, and ‘integrity‘. They would die to remain in the path of truth, trying to be the good student of the class, and obviously being everyone’s absolute favourite. I do wonder what they would be doing in the age of OBEs.

With the launch of a new model of learning – the virtual mode, how can students refrain from acquiring such methods when the system itself calls for this practice? Can we really blame the students for surrendering themselves to these methods when society itself prioritizes the numbers? It is difficult to silence the roar of ethics and validity when there is a stream of OBE across the university.

OBE is the acronym for Open Book Examination; which itself implies open books and helping notes during the exams. Now, even if we try to dodge the questions of their efficiency, how does one deal with the questions of self-integrity? Well, a simple answer to the question may be to conduct exams in the conventional way.

One of the characteristics of OBEs is that there is no one way to ace it. In some instances, a long detailed answer goes weel, but however, in other just the bare minimum works. Probably, that’s the reason why students handle OBE as its name goes – with an open book. But that’s not all; then comes those who prewrite the answers and manage to submit 12 answer sheets for a single question itself. When learning is pushed off the cliff, as a result, the competitiveness increases.

The different institutions under the university moreover, felicitated the best-performing students in OBES with a decent GPA. Was it a sarcastic step to mock students who prided on getting good grades in OBE, or an effort to approve of this mockery of education? We would never know if it’s either, or none, but one can surely guess for themselves.

It is not strange to us the notion like ‘good children score good grades and do well in examinations’. However, owing to the new normal, the understanding of the ‘exam system’ has got dismantled. Being a third-year student who has appeared for two OBEs can surely assure you that.

As students of ‘covid batch’, we are hanging by a dangling thread with our degree certificates on one end and our learning on the another. But are we truly able to balance it out or the pressure is greater on the certificates’ side? Ponder upon it!

The dilemma of OBE is, therefore, something that engulfs many of us as we upload all the readings on a drive to copy-paste from them in the upcoming examinations, while wondering about what we actually learned during the year in this highly reputed university.