Students studying under the Tamil Nadu state syllabus will get half an hour extra to complete their public exam papers from the academic year 2019-20. The announcement was made by the KA Sengottaiyan, the Tamil Nadu School Education Minister.

Confirming the development to Tamil news channel Puthiya Thalaimurai, KA Sengottaiyan said that the decision was taken by the school education department with the consent of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister. “We received representations from various stakeholders to increase the time allocated to write the exam since the syllabus is also new. Hence after a discussion with the School Education Secretary, appropriate direction has been sent to the concerned department to issue the Government order,” he said.

According to the Government Order, the students of classes 10, 11 and 12 will now get three hours to write the exams and ten minutes for reading the question paper. Five minutes will be provided for verifying the particulars of the candidates. The exams for these students will start at 10 am and end at 1.15 pm.

At present students writing class 10 board exams in Tamil Nadu are allocated 2.5 hours and a 15-minute reading time for question papers, while students of classes 11 and 12 are allocated 2.5 hours for each paper.

The increase in the exam time comes as the latest in a slew of measures adopted by the Tamil Nadu School Education Department to improve the quality of students graduating out of the systems and make them capable of tackling competitive entrance exams like the NEET and IIT-JEE. A complete revamp of the syllabus, an option for students to choose their subjects to study for board exams are some of the reforms brought in by the school education department with an aim to accomplish the goal.