Calcutta, March 5: Students appearing in this year’s higher secondary examinations will get 15 minutes extra to write.

Like previous years, the examinations will start at 10 in the morning and continue till 1.15pm.

Earlier, the answer scripts had to be handed over at 1.

Other boards, like those conducting the Madhyamik, ICSE, ISC and CBSE examinations, also provide 15 minutes extra to examinees, but that is only to read the question paper before the examination begins.

HS examinees will have the right to decide what they want to do in the additional period.

“We have taken several measures to modernise the examination — bifurcating the course (with split syllabi and exams for Class XI and XII), introducing grades, scrapping divisions and allott- ing 15 minutes extra,” Gopa Dutta, the president of the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education, said today.

“The entire exercise is meant to reduce students’ stress. We are leaving it to the examinees to decide how to utilise the 15 minutes as we feel it will reduce their stress further,” she added.

Question papers and answer scripts will be distributed together as soon as the examination starts at 10am.

In other board examinations, candidates are not allowed to put pen to paper in the first 15 minutes.

The council said the number of examinees this year will be much higher than in 2007. As many as 4,49,945 examinees will appear in HS 2008.

Around four lakh students had taken the test last year.

“There has been a near 12 per cent rise in the number of candidates this time,” said Debashis Sarkar, the council secretary.

The number of dropouts at the higher secondary level has apparently gone down over the past two years with the bifurcation of the course.

“The lower dropout rate has led to a rise in the number of enrolments for the exam,” a council official said.

The 2006 Madhyamik batch, which is appearing for higher secondary this year, had nearly 90,000 examinees more than 2005. “This is also one of the reasons for the increase in the number of HS examinees,” the official said.