New Delhi: With the board examinations beginning next week, class 10 and 12 students are a tense lot, busy with last-minute preparations while the Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE) helpline is ringing non-stop, say counsellors attending to anxious parents and children.

"I am not nervous. I just have this one problem - I have been studying at night and end up sleeping through the morning. I will have to set my clock right over the next few days," said Sneha Ramani, a class 10 student.

Her mother Parvati has been talking to counsellors through the CBSE helpline number constantly.

"I was very worried that she doesn't study during the day. I do not know how well prepared she is after her night time studying. However, she says that is the only time she can concentrate. The counsellors said this was normal and she should just sleep at least eight hours and stop the night studying before the boards since the exams are in the morning," she said.

Over 1.6 million students will sit for the CBSE examinations starting March 3, 2010, at over 5,500 centres spread across the country and abroad.

As the exam day nears, CBSE helplines have been flooded with phone calls from anxious students and parents seeking ways to deal with stress.

As many as 52 principals, trained counsellors from schools, psychologists and social scientists are operating helplines from locations like Delhi, Noida, Chandigarh, Meerut, Jaipur, Faridabad, Bhubaneswar, Vishakhapatnam, Jamnagar, Bhopal, Nagpur, Bangalore, Guwahati and Pune. There are also three helpline centres outside India at Kuwait, Dubai and Doha.

"We have received an overwhelming response from students and their parents. I am constantly answering calls. Some of the students are anxious about the exams and I talk to them for over an hour sometimes... Though most queries are about their admit card, how to answer the questions and syllabus," CBSE counsellor Avantika Arora, from Delhi Public School Noida, told the sources.

She added that students ought to relax now. "With last minute studying, no one can suddenly get a 90 percent. Revise your stuff and be confident is what we tell students."

Leading psychiatrist Samir Parikh says he gets many cases where children get very stressed and develop sleeping disorders, gastric symptoms, start smoking and even give in to memory enhancement pills.

"Pressure to perform well results in anxiety and affects performance. I get several questions about what would happen if things would go wrong, or how sleep gets affected," Parikh said.

Career counsellor Usha Albuquerque has also been facing many such cases.

"I deal with many class 12 board students. Their anxiety is because they are uncertain about college admissions and whether their marks will be 'good enough'. It is a competitive world. But children must remember even during the boards that there are many options after school," Albuquerque told the sources.

The class 12 examinations start with the Physics paper, while class 10 begins with Music. This year, 902,517 students of class 10 and 699,129 of class 12 will appear for the exams. Of these 20,000 are students from Gulf countries.

"It will be the first time that the new grading system has been introduced at Secondary School level (for Classes 9 and 10) effective from 2009-10 academic sessions," CBSE spokesperson Rama Sharma said. IANS