Prayagraj (UP), Dec 11 (IANS): Students appearing for the UP Board Class 10 and Class 12 exams in 2023 will be given answer sheets having barcodes and monograms on them.

The Board has taken this initiative with the aim of eliminating the scope of manipulation of answer sheets.

Divyakant Shukla, secretary, UP Board, said, "Introducing the practice of having barcodes and monograms on answer sheets will enable us to do justice with the students, especially the meritorious ones. This will also help us put a check on unscrupulous elements trying to tarnish the image of the Board for their own interest, as the foremost priority of the government is to conduct fair and totally transparent exams."

He said that the Board will also random-check some answer sheets using the barcodes which will further put a noose around those involved in copying.

Officials said that for the Class 10 and 12 examinees, the Board has ordered the government press to print more than three crore answer sheets. These will be sent to all districts from January-end 2023 for the Board exams.

From this year itself, the Board has also decided to send stitched answer sheets to all districts because in the previous years there were complaints of changing copies by removing the staples.

Gangs involved in copying used to change the front page of the answer sheet of meritorious students that contain roll number and other details with that of students of their own choice.

Likewise, with the barcode printed in each answer sheet, the copies of one centre cannot be replaced by those of any other centre by anyone, thereby further minimising the chances of answer copies getting changed, purposely or otherwise, or getting lost.

According to official sources, a total of 31,16,485 students have been registered for Class 10 and 27,50,913 have registered for Class 12 for the 2023 examination.

In comparison, in the 2021-22 session a total of 51,92,689 students had registered to appear in the exams that began on March 24, 2022. This had included 27,81,654 for Class 10 and 24,11,035 for Class 12.