Edited from previous posts.
Not in my experience. OBE is pretty good **IF** it’s implemented properly. It’s not in SA. It smells of an educational theoretician tasked with “define an educational system suitable for SA”. They did. Not their fault if the implementers are too useless to implement it properly. OBE could work if there were any people with the remotest clue about how to implement it, taking into consideration the useless, illiterate implementers. Good evaluation questions are the key (to test outcomes). OBE is OK. **Nothing** would work in SA. You are supplying a scapegoat. “We would all be rocket scientists if OBE wasn’t used”.
The way to implement OBE properly is to use a classification (of objectives) method like Bloom’s Taxonomy. This is a good model I have found (although there are others). Bloom’s taxonomy (of educational objectives, I think) has about 8 items. The lower ranked ones (1, 2…) are the simplest and easiest to teach and would apply to schools. The higher ranked ones (judgement, critical thinking etc.) are where the lecturer’s value lies in tertiary education (otherwise it is just rote learning). The student doesn’t need a lecturer for that – there is no value added (they can read it). So, the student should know the lower ranked objectives (jargon, basic concepts etc. learnt at school) before the lecturer’s input is meaningful. It’s a waste of lecturer talent (as well as being tedious) for them to have to do shlep teaching of elementary objectives at university level. Defining the evaluation questions which test the student’s grasp of the higher objectives (judgement, critical thinking etc.) is where skill lies. Most university lecturers fail at this.
What’s not done properly (considering it’s importance) is defining output objectives correctly. Everything rests upon this (it’s like a foundation). If the objectives are defined incorrectly, the whole curriculum is screwed.