The Civil Services Preliminary examination, which was conducted on Sunday witnessed less attendance percentage in the capital as only 43 per cent aspirants appeared for the morning session and 42.58 in the afternoon session.

About 38,982 aspirants registered for the morning session, of these, 16,761 candidates appeared for the examination. In the afternoon session, 6,600 candidates took the examination.

The district administration claimed that the examination was conducted at 80 centres in the capital and no untoward incidents were reported during the test.

In its analysis for Civil Services Aptitude Test -2013 (Paper II), Triumphant Institute of Management Education (T.I.M.E.) said the paper had 80 questions and each of these questions carried equal marks of 2.5.

There were 74 questions for which 0.833 marks was deducted for any wrong answer marked and the remaining questions (on Decision Making and Problem Solving) did not carry any negative marking.

In English part, each of the questions was based on a specific passage. Out of 12 passages, there were three passages which were simpler to understand as compared to the remaining ones.

These questions demanded good application of logic, and inference and hence clearly were more analytical. The level of difficulty in this part of English was clearly moderate-difficult, remarked T.I.M.E analysis.

However, questions pertaining to Maths and Reasoning were such that in order to crack them, the candidate need to be good in reasoning and elementary mathematical skills.

Overall, the difficulty level of the paper was moderate, observed Rajesh Saraf, Course Director, CSAT, T.I.M.E.