Over 5 lakh to appear for Odisha Class-X board exams from Feb 22

Bhubaneswar: Over 5 lakh students will appear for the annual Class-X High School Certificate Examination conducted by the Board of Secondary Education (BSE) in Odisha which will begin from February 22 and continue till March 8, 2019.

Board president Jahan Ara Begum today informed that a total of 5,72,699 students are set to appear the annual examination out of which 5,45,364 students are regular, 25,008 are ex-regular candidates, 2,106 regular correspondence, and 221 ex-regular candidates. The examinations will be conducted across 2,830 examination centres across the state.

The board president further informed that examination for Madhyama stream will also be held simultaneously with the Matric examination. Around 2,754 regular and 255 ex-regular students will sit for the examinations at 44 centres across the State. In Open schooling category, 12,012 students will appear the annual examinations out of which 6,894 candidates are regular and the rest will have to clear their back papers at 79 examination centres across Odisha.

Around 304 nodal centres have been set up at all districts for safekeeping of question papers and 693 dispatch teams have been constituted for distributing question papers from nodal centres to schools.

In terms of some major reforms incorporated this year, the board has changed the timing of the examination. Earlier, the examination used to begin at 9 AM but this year, the exams will begin at 10 AM. Accordingly the distribution timings of question papers, opening of OMR sheet have also been changed.

This apart, unlike previous years, when the question papers used to be dispatched to the centres a day before the examination; this year, the question sets will be sent to the centres in the morning on the day of the exam itself, said the board president.

To ensure security, free and fair examination, CCTV cameras are also being installed at the examination centres, informed sources.