While it is already common knowledge that the State Board of Technical Education and Training (SBTET), Telangana, will be conducting open book examinations (OBE) for the subjects English and Math in the coming semester of polytechnic courses, they are also gearing up to extend it further, "The idea was to make education more application-oriented than just rote-learning. We hope to extend open book examinations to other subjects and other years as well in a phased manner, especially for application-oriented subjects. Next in line will be subjects like Programming in Computers," says Navin Mittal, Chairman, SBTET. This is for students who are pursuing their Diploma in Engineering whose exams begin in January 2022.   

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 talks about theoretical and practical learning and OBE is in line with it says the Chairman of SBTET and adds that they have already taken a few steps to implement it like offering flexibility in terms of subject choices. "We used to have fixed subject combinations, but since 2019, we moved to the choice-based system for government colleges and just last year, for others as well," says the chairman. The subjects have been divided into four buckets which makes it easy for students to choose, timetable management and it is easy to conduct examinations as well, he points out. 

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Next, again in line with NEP's multiple entry and multiple exit points, SBTET hopes to offer certificates even to those Engineering students who drop out in their second year from a three-year diploma programme. "Right now, if they drop out they do not get anything. So we are working towards this," he shares.