Three hours later, they walked out relaxed, because only a few questions in the Chemistry paper were based on HOTS. Though lengthy, the paper had been negotiated with confidence, and they had enough reason to welcome the new pattern.

For Sudhib B, a Class 12 student of Venkat International Public School, the paper was tougher but anxiety over HOTS were unfounded. “Around five per cent of the questions was similar to HOTS. Time was accurate but the paper was not easy,” he said, walking out of the examination centre.

Priyamvada Bhaskar, a Class 12 student of National Public School in Rajajinagar, said she took the entire allotted time to answer the paper. “I got very little time to revise the answers. We were informed that we would be able to complete the paper half an hour early, but that didn’t happen,” she said and added that memory based questions were reduced drastically. She welcomed the new pattern.

Abhijoy Dutta, who took the exam at Kendriya Vidayalaya Malleswaram, said if the students had studied from NCERT text books, they could have answered good number of questions.

‘Had idea’

Karthik Shyam , a Class 12 student, said that he had an idea about the paper pattern. “It’s not as difficult as I thought it would be. Though the paper was lengthy I was able to answer all the questions,” he added.

The Class X examinations too got underway on Saturday with many students taking the paper on “Introduction to Information Technology.” Also scheduled for the day were papers on Elements of Business, Elements of book-keeping  and accounting, and Typewriting theory (English and Hindi).

Rudrakash Dwivedi, a class 10 student of Delhi Public School Yelahanka appeared for the Introductory to Information Technology. He found the paper easy and said, “most questions were direct and appeared from the text books.”

Another Class 10 student, who also appeared for this paper, said the time was more than sufficient. “Paper was good and I could easily finish the paper within one-and-a-half hours,” the student added.

The HOTS based questions were prescribed by the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), the guiding document for preparation of NCERT text books.

Across the country, a total of 7,65,095 candidates had registered for the Class X exam, while 5,48,815 students were to appear for the Class XII exam.

More candidates

The total number of registered candidates showed an eight per cent increase over the number of students last year. Over 12 lakh students had appeared in the exams last year. About 2,500 physically-challenged students had registered for this year’s exams. They include 373 visually-challenged students in Class X and 214 such candidates in Class XII.

The Board has set up 2,624 centres for Class X and 2,394 centres for Class XII students.

There were about 18,000 candidates from foreign countries.