Chennai: Around 34,000 students refrained from writing the public exams for class 12 yesterday.
The outbreak of coronavirus pandemic is cited as the reason for students not turning up for the exam. On Tuesday, science students wrote chemistry paper and commerce students wrote accountancy paper.
In Thiruvallur district, 1500 students did not attend the exam and 1650 students did not appear for the exam in Madurai, sources said. The exams were conducted in 16,716 centres across the State.
However, president of Tamilnadu Teachers Association, P K Ilamaran said, ”I do not think that coronavirus is the reason for the high number of absentees. Last year for SSLC exam, 27,000 students did not write. But this was regarded as general absentees who were not confident to write it. We have to examine if these students were absent in other exams conducted in the past few days.”
Nearly, 9.45 lakh students had registered for the exams. The Class 11 exam scheduled for 26 March is postponed.