The Maharashtra State Council of Examination (MSCE) has announced the postponement of the Scholarship Exam of Class 5th and Class 8th. The examination was scheduled for May 23, 2021. However, owing to the surge in the COVID-19 cases, the council has announced the postponement of the exam. MSCE has further asked the students to keep a tab on the official website for the latest updates regarding the same. The written test has been postponed twice, initially, it was scheduled for April 25, 2021 however amid the pandemic it was rescheduled for May 23, 2021.
The examination is conducted annually by MSCE to provide financial assistance to the candidates who belong to the SC/ST/Nomadic Groups. Only those candidates who qualify the basic eligibility criteria are called to appear in this exam from the class 5th and class 8th batch. The council conducts the exam in at least 8 languages and the candidates can choose their language while applying for the same. The scholarship is provided based on the ranks and scores obtained by the participant in the written test.
As per the official notification released by PUPSS, the candidates willing to apply should be a permanent domicile of Maharashtra. The age limit of the candidates applying for PUP (Class 5th) should be 11 years while the age limit of the candidates applying for PSS(Class 8th) is 14 years. There are age relaxations for the candidates who belong to the reserved quota. In addition to this, the candidates must be a student of class 5th and class 8th in any Government/Private school.
The Scholarship examination conducted by the MSCE for eligible candidates is usually conducted offline or in pen and paper mode. The language of the exam can be any of the eight languages i.e. Marathi/ English/ Hindi/ Gujarati/ Telugu/ Kannada/ Urdu/ Sindhi. There are usually two papers and each paper accounts for 75 questions each making it 150 questions in total. The questions are multiple-choice based which means for each question there are five options available and the candidates have to mark the correct option out of all the options given. The candidates get 2 marks for marking the correct option while there is no mention of negative marking for the wrong answer.
Regarding the first paper, there are two subjects i.e. Language and Mathematics. The Language section has 25 questions while the Mathematics section has 50 questions. In Paper 2, there are two sub-parts, the first one is a Language paper that has 25 questions while the second part is the Intelligence test which comprises 50 questions. The candidates who are successful in these two papers with high marks are awarded a scholarship by the MSCE for further studies.
