Examinees come out of a centre after appearing in the Central Teacher Eligibility Test in Patna on Sunday. Picture by Ashok Sinha

Patna, June 26: The Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET) conducted for the first time by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) witnessed frustration among the examinees today, who claimed that the papers were lengthy.

On the other hand, sources said the examinees were unaware of the nature of the questions that would be asked. The test, meant to check teachers’ efficiency, was conducted across the country and abroad.

Sources in the CBSE, Patna regional office, said there were 21 examination centres in the state capital and more than 20,000 candidates took the test. Those aspiring to become teachers or teachers who wanted to acquire the certificate, took the test today.

The minimum qualification for the test was BEd degree and those candidates who had taken the BEd examination and were awaiting the results were also eligible to appear for the test.

Sources said the candidates would be given grades accordingly and a minimum of 60 per cent marks is required for the qualifying grade. The test was conducted in two sittings of 90 minutes each.

Muzaffarpur resident, Pramod Kumar, said he was unhappy with the number of questions that required to be answered in the stipulated time.

Pramod said: “We were not given extra time to read the questions or to fill in the optical mark record sheet, which carries roll number, centre and other such things. It took 10 minutes just to fill the sheet. Moreover, though the answers dealt with multiple-choice questions, it took a lot of time to read the long passages. Later, after reading those passages we were required to answer certain questions from them.”

The passages were to check the reading ability of the candidates. Krishna Kumar Singh, another aspiring teacher who took the test, said: “The papers were too lengthy to answer in a short span of time (three hours).”

Sources said this was the first time that the CBSE had conducted the CTET and no guide or preparatory resources were authentically available in the market beforehand.

Many students were not aware of the type of questions that would come in the test.

Some of the examinees were of the opinion that they had to struggle to weed out the nature of questions according to the subjects they had applied for. The questions related to different subjects were not separately given.

Ram Kumar Yadav of Saharsa said: “We had to look for questions on subjects that we had applied for. Those of social science were in the same section that of the science subjects.”

Ajay Kumar of Patna, too, felt that the paper was lengthy. He said: “At my centre, all the candidates were frustrated and felt that more time should have been given to write the paper.”

Vice-principal of May Flower School, one among the CTET examination centres, P.S. Ambastha said: “One who has studied thoroughly would not have faced any problem in the test. However, it was a serious problem that model question papers were not available in the market to understand the type of question that would have come in the CTET.”