This year's Primary Education Completion (PEC) and Ebtedayee Examinations for the fifth graders began across the country today.

The two and a half hour-long tests started at 10:30 am and will end at 1:00 pm.

A total of 27,77,270 students are appearing in the exams among which 12,78,000 students are male and 14,98,000 are female.

This time, there is no MCQ type question in the examination covering total 600 marks for six subjects.

The number of this year's examinees is 23,472 higher than that of last year.

On the first day of the exams, students of both PEC and Ebtedayee appeared for the English paper.