Chennai: The Class XII state board exams began on a happy note for more than eight lakh students across the state on Monday. The first exam—Tamil—was said to be easy and many students walked out of 3,412 exam centres in a jubilant mood. Of 8,16,289 lakh students who applied for the exam across the state, 9,919 were absent. Of the absentees, 8,319 were school-going students and others were private candidates. In the city, where the exam was held at 250 centres, 693 of 64,690 applicants were absent. Of them 536 were regular school-goers. No instances of malpractice were reported anywhere.When TOI visited schools in Adyar, Thiruvanmiyur and Saidapet, students who took the Tamil language paper seemed largely content with their performance. “The questions were from the practice section printed at the end of every chapter in the text book. One mark questions were from the chapters, but those too were simple and direct,” said S K Akshaya, a student of Chennai Girls School, Saidapet. Earlier in the day, the school education minister Anbil Mahesh Poyyamozhi inspected an exam centre in Saidapet and said instructions were issued to authorities and local bodies to ensure uninterrupted power supply and security for examination-related work, and make basic arrangements at the exam centres on all days. Answering a question on the govt backtracking on the appointment of non-subject teachers and college students as scribes, the minister said that it was done in the interest of students. “Several petitions were sent to the chief minister by parents opposing our move. Hence we decided to have subject teachers as scribes,” he said.Outside the exam centres, several anxious parents waited for the entire duration of the exam.
