Over 40,000 students from 526 government, aided and private schools in the district wrote the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) board examination on Thursday.
The district reported 1,288 absentees, according to the data shared by the School Education Department. The language exam was held in 157 centres, including private ones.
A total of 41,530 students were given hall tickets of which 40,242 - 31,320 in the Coimbatore educational district and 8,922 in Pollachi - attended. The exams are held from 10 a.m. to 1.15 p.m. and a 180-member flying squad was formed to prevent malpractices.
According to Coimbatore District Education Officer K. Pandiya Rajasekaran, in Coimbatore (apart from Pollachi), 361 scribes were allotted, 17 students were exempted for Tamil exam, and probably 90 for the English exam. An additional hour is given for special students who write the exam by themselves, but there were no such students in Coimbatore. This extra time is not for those who are allotted a scribe, according to the official.
Chief Education Officer R. Boopathy was not available for comment despite repeated attempts.
S. Haripriya (15), a government school student, said, “Apart from the one-mark questions and a few for two marks, the rest of the question paper was quite easy.”
R. Hemalatha, a Tamil teacher in Coimbatore Cloth Merchant Association (CCMA) Government Girls Higher Secondary School, said, “We gave special coaching for slow learners due to which their performance improved in the last revision exams.” She expressed the hope that the students would have written the exam well.
Teachers in a government school said the model exams for Classes VI-IX were to begin on Friday from 2 p.m. to 4.30 p.m.
Tiruppur
In Tiruppur, 30,148 students of the total 30,672 from 354 schools wrote this exam in 106 centres. A team of 178 teachers was formed as flying squad.
