Cuttack, Feb. 22: The high school certificate examination begins tomorrow across the state and the students did their best to keep themselves calm to put up a good show.

Over six lakh students will take the matriculation examination, while most of the students were busy revising their syllabus today.

"Today, bulk of the time was spent on going through all the chapters even though most of us had completed the revision last week," said Swati Das, a student.

Despite knowing that overburdening of the students might cause undue stress on the candidates and affect their performance, the parents were keen to ensure that their wards complete the revision of at least two subjects.

Usually there is interference of parents who are keen to ensure that their kids complete the revision of all the topics before the examination.

According to experts, the undue interference might overburden the children as they experience higher-level of stress, anxiety and depression before the examination.

"We have asked the parents not to interfere in the preparations, as it is the student who knows better about it. We had advised most of the students in our batch to undertake yoga to concrete more and ward of undue stress," said Saumitra Sen, a teacher.

As the Board of Secondary Education (BSE) has introduced grading system, students only need to concentrate on learning the basics of each subject as the entire marking system is based on objective and as well as subjective questions.

"All the friends in our group were relatively calm despite repeated pressure from teachers and parents to revise the syllabus. We even took out time to watch the match between India and South Africa, which really helped to concentrate more on studies later in the evening," said Sudhansu Patra, a student.

On the other hand, a BSE official said that adequate steps were taken to ensure that students did not feel the pressure of the examination, as one needed only basic knowledge to crack it.

"We are providing extra time to students to go through the questions and there are both objective and subjective questions, including the optical mark recognition (OMR) pattern," said BSE president D.P. Nanda.

A three-tier arrangement has been made by the BSE for the smooth conduct of the examination and security of the question papers, including OMR sheets and answer booklets.

All the confidential documents have been kept at 302 nodal centres and special arrangements have been made for the security of question papers in Maoist-affected districts, where it has been kept at 22 police stations.