Testing their mettle will be the board examinations, with the ICSE beginning on February 20 and the CBSE exams commencing on March 1 and 3.

As many as 6,000 students from Bangalore will be appearing for ICSE examination in 48 centres across Bangalore city. While about 4,500 candidates will appear for the exam from Bangalore Central, 900 will appear from Bangalore North and 700 from Bangalore South.

Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will conduct the Class 12 examination on March 1 and Class 10 examination on March 3. As many as 96,903 students from Chennai region are expected to write the Class 10 exam while 48,623 students will be appearing for Class 12 exam. Number of students appearing for the Class 10 exam from Karnataka is 11,581 and 4,473 students are appearing for Class 12, N Nagaraju, CBSE Chennai Regional Officer said.

The students appearing for the CBSE examination - both Class 10 and 12 - will have new question paper for the students, which involves Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). The 2008 examination, which is set on the new curriculum, will have 20 per cent of questions based on HOTS.

In HOTS pattern, the students will have to understand and interpret the questions, which is “more of application based,” as a teacher put it. 

Like last year, this year too, the students will be given an additional of 15 minutes so that they get time to read the questions.