About 75 percent of the 6.64 lakh candidates, who have registered to appear for the Tamilnadu Public Service Commission Group II preliminary examination turned up to write it on Sunday.
Many candidates who took the examination held conducted across the State in 2,269 centres, found the standard of the question paper to be equal to that of defence services and UPSC examinations that requires logical thinking.
A Navaneethakrishnan said approximately 75 percent of the registered candidates appeared for the test and the results would be out in three months time.
“We did not receive any complaints and everything went on smoothly. We are working on releasing the results in three months. We will receive the final list of candidates who appeared for the examination on Monday,” he said.
The examination was for 1,064 job vacancies including that for income tax deputy commissioner, sub-registrar, junior employment officer and revenue assistants. In Chennai alone, 79,550 candidates were registered to appear in 263 centres.
Many candidates found the questions easy to answer but they said it needed logical thinking.
“Almost 85 percent of the questions were easy to answer. The standard was equal to that of UPSC. The questions were not direct and most of them required logical thinking,” said a former private bank employee Saraswathi, who appeared for examination in Ethiraj College. Another candidate, S Sridhar found the standard of the question paper very high and compared it to the combined defence services examination. “They had more science related questions. Maths and English was easy. But, overall the standard is increasing and I took the exam just for a challenge,” said Sridhar, who is preparing for UPSC exams.
Candidates who appeared for general Tamil also found that unlike previous years, this time the paper was set in a way that required the candidate to have an in depth knowledge of Tamil literature. “In Tamil, we were given a few lines from a poem and asked the name of the poet. The questions were similar to that asked in English. For answering the questions, the candidate required in depth knowledge, besides thinking and reading capacity. Earlier, there used to be a pattern of questions that were repeated and it was easy. It is not the same anymore,” said Arjana, who wrote her examination in a school at Villivakkam.