Bengaluru, Aug 8 : The much awaited results of the Karnataka board's Secondary School Leaving Certificate (class 10) examinations will be declared at 3.30 p.m. on Monday on its official websites, said an official here. The results will be released online on state's official websites - kseeb.kar.nic.in and karresults.nic.in. - by newly sworn in Education Minister B.C. Nagesh at the Karnataka Secondary Education Examination Board (KSEEB) headquarters at Malleshwaram in the city. The results will also be sent to individual students through SMS. Amid Covid fears, the KSEEB was forced to conduct SSLC examinations in absence of 'proper assessment' as the state had decided to promote class 9 students in 2019-20 to class 10 without holding examinations after the sudden outbreak of Covid in March 2020. In absence of proper yardstick to assess the students, the KSEEB opted to conduct this year's examinations differently from the regular offline exams. This time, all SSLC/class 10 students answered Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) on Optical mark recognition or Optical Mark Reading (OMR) sheet and wrote the exams in two days - July 19 was reserved for core subjects (Maths, Science and Social science) and on July 22 examinations for language subjects were held. A total of 8.76 lakh students had appeared for the examinations. The exams were held only on two days (July 19 and 22) due to the pandemic. The KSEEB had released the key answers for SSLC exams on July 23. This was for the second consecutive year that the KSEEB conducted the SSLC examinations after the Covid outbreak in March last year. However, for the first time the examinations were reduced from six days to two days with students writing one paper for three subjects each day. Due to a simpler form of examinations, it was also observed that the attendance per subject had improved this time with nearly 99.6 per cent of the total candidates had appeared, which was slightly more compared to last year's (2020) attendance which stood at 98.30 per cent for core subjects. In 2020, the class 10 exam result was announced on August 10 and the overall pass percentage recorded in the state was 71.80 per cent, which is nearly a two per cent drop from 2019. Owing to Covid concerns, the KSEEB had increased the number of examination centres and teachers on duty this year, with as many as 1.19 lakh staff deployed for 73,064 exam halls in 4,885 centres across the state. Besides increasing staff and examination halls, the state had also deployed Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers, police personnel, volunteers from scouts and guides, and representatives from NGOs to ensure all Covid-related Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) were followed during these crucial examinations. /IANS