NTA to re-conduct UGC-NET exams for English, Sociology, Commerce after complaints

The National Testing Agency (NTA) is re-conducting the UGC-NET exams for English, Sociology, and Commerce following multiple complaints from candidates about errors in the question papers for these subjects. The NTA stated that while English and Commerce re-exams will be conducted on September 9, the Sociology re-exam will be conducted on September 10. 

The NTA conducted the UGC-NET exam for recruitment to posts of Assistant Professors and Junior Research Fellowships, as well as PhD admissions, in 87 subjects during the last week of June.

After the exams, the testing agency received several complaints about multiple errors in these papers. Candidates and student groups flagged large-scale question repetitions from past years (e.g. in English and Commerce) alongside severe spelling mistakes, poor translations, and garbled scholar names in the Sociology paper.

NTA Director Abhishek Singh told The Hindu, “NTA has decided to re-conduct exams for three subjects after many complaints were received regarding errors in the question papers. A committee made to review these complaints came to the conclusion that the exams needed to be re-conducted.”

“The Committee found that the three papers had many factual, typographical, and translation errors, including misspelt names of prominent scholars, garbled book titles, errors in the stem wording of questions, grammatical errors, gender and number agreement errors, punctuation mistakes, and non-standard coined terms for established concepts, as well as repetition of a significant number of questions previously administered,” Mr. Singh further stated. 

The Committee recommended that, in the interest of holding a fair and error-free examination, these three papers should be re-conducted.

“It has therefore been concluded by NTA that papers carrying such defects do not meet the standards of fairness and error-free examination, and defects of this extent cannot be cured merely by dropping questions after the challenge process,” a public notice issued by the NTA stated. 

There were spelling errors in the Sociology paper, with incorrect names and questions that appeared disconnected from the prescribed syllabus. For example, “Ritzer” appeared as “Putzer”, “Parsons” as “Parsow”, and “AR Desai” as “AK Desai”, among many other errors. 

In the case of English, 67 of 150 questions were the same as those in the English paper of the NET held in December 2024, including the sequence of answer options. In Commerce, over 80 questions were allegedly repeated from the same paper. 

“Further details of city, centre, and admit card details will be notified separately on the official website. No additional examination fee will be charged from the candidates of these three subjects for the re-conduct,” NTA has stated in the notice. 

“Results for the 84 subjects for which Answer Key Challenge was issued earlier today will be declared as per schedule. Allocation of JRF seats and issuance of e-certificates for eligibility for Assistant Professor and for admission to PhD for these 84 subjects will not be delayed due to re-conduct of the examination for the three subjects,” the notice has stated. 

“The number of candidates to be qualified for eligibility for Assistant Professor shall be equal to 6% of the candidates who appeared in the test conducted in June 2026, or the retest, whichever is higher,” the notice stated.