NEW DELHI - Hundreds of thousands of students sat for the class 10 and 12 Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) exams in centres across the country and abroad Monday and many of them said they found the paper ‘easy’ and ‘doable’.

Many students, at a exam centre here, walked out with a smile on their faces and hugged their parents and teachers.

‘The paper was doable. It was not lengthy. Mostly easy stuff,’ said an excited Anjali, a class 12 student of C.S.K. Memorial Public School.

The Class 12 exams began with the chemistry paper while Class 10 kicked off with ancillary papers like elementary business and IT.

‘I am satisfied with the paper. I only hope the marking isn’t too strict because the paper was quiet easy,’ said Ankur Priyadarshi, another student.

Himani Sagar of the Daisy Day Public School, whose exam centre was in the Mother’s International School at Sri Aurobindo Ashram, said all the questions were direct and from the syllabus.

‘Now I have to prepare for the rest of the papers and I wish things go well,’ said Sagar with a smile on her face.

Parents — some waited outside the examination centre throughout the three-hour long paper — looked relieved after hearing that their children’s exam went off well.

‘It’s such a relief when your kids are satisfied after their exams. It’s even more important that the first paper goes off well because then it sets the tempo for the upcoming examinations,’ said Sagar’s mother.

This year over 1.45 million students are sitting for the board examinations at over 5,000 centres spread across the country and abroad. There are 824,438 students of Class 10 and 637,578 students of Class 12 taking the board exams.

Several medical and engineering coaching institutes, hoping to woo prospective clients, had hung up colourful banners wishing the students good luck.