Patna: The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) has decided to provide dummy optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets to students to practice answering multiple-choice questions before their matriculation and Intermediate exams in February.

Under a new pattern, more than half the questions in both matriculation and Intermediate exams will be multiple-choice . Sixty lakh OMR sheets will be supplied to schools so that students get a feel of the new technology. The 60-lakh OMR sheets will include 30 lakh cover pages, for entering students' names and other details, and 30 lakh other sheets for filling up answers.

"We have decided to provide dummy OMR sheets to students so that there is no confusion during exam," BSEB chairman Anand Kishor said.

BSEB will introduce a series of changes in Class X and XII exam papers from 2018. It has decided to reduce the number of subjective questions so that the papers become high scoring. OMR sheets will be provided for the objective questions, which will carry one mark each.

There will be a training session on January 6. On Saturday, there will be training session for all district programme officers (DEOs), three teachers from each district and block education officers.

They will be trained on how to fill OMR sheets, OMR answer sheets, attendance sheets and other niceties that are to be introduced in the exam. Once trained they will be the master trainers who will provide training to all headmasters and two teachers from all schools in the respective districts in two phases, on January 9 and 10.