NTA in spotlight again as it orders re-tests after UGC-NET errors

The National Testing Agency (NTA) will reconduct examinations in three papers of the UGC-NET after discovering several discrepancies and errors in the English, Commerce and Sociology papers, according to a statement by its director of examinations. The re-examination will be held for English, Commerce and Sociology on September 9 and 10.

NTA has been at the centre of massive protests by young people in India, particularly students, who had hit the streets demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. He eventually stepped down following an agitation in the national capital led by the newly formed Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) and its allies over the recent NEET-UG question paper leak and a raft of irregularities, including those related to the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system used by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), as well as other technical glitches. NEET-UG is short for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) for medical admission.

NTA, which functions under the Ministry of Education and conducts entrance examinations and admissions, conducted the UGC-NET examination in June 2026 from June 22 to 30 across 87 subjects “for the award of Junior Research Fellowship, eligibility for Assistant Professor, and admission to PhD programmes”. The English and Commerce examinations will be held in the ​m​orning and afternoon, respectively, ​of September 9, while Sociology will be held in the morning of September 10, the statement said.

NTA had constituted a committee to review the papers following several complaints. The committee found that the three papers contained “many factual, typographical, 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”, the NTA statement said.

“The Committee recommended that, in the interest of holding a fair and error-free examination, these three papers should be re-conducted,” it added. No additional examination fee will be charged to candidates appearing for the re-examination in these three subjects.

Results for the other 84 subjects were issued on August 16. NTA said it remained committed to conducting examinations that are fair, accurate and transparent. In the recent protests, several student protesters had demanded the scrapping of NTA over its alleged repeated failure to conduct examinations without errors.