New Delhi: The National Testing Agency (NTA) is under fire after a record 12 questions were dropped because of errors from the final answer key of the engineering entrance exam JEE Main 2025 held in January.
Despite dropping questions, the error rate in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) exceeded the threshold, rising to 1.6 percent from the 0.6 percent limit. Students and teachers raised concerns over the agency’s transparency, citing dropped questions, out-of-syllabus content and translation errors.
“The NTA conducts major exams like NEET, NET and JEE. They should be more responsible when setting the question paper,” said Shruti Shah, who took the exam in January. “Students like me spend years preparing, and every question matters. Such mistakes cannot be tolerated,” she added.
This is not the first time errors have been found in the exam, but this time the number of questions removed from the final answer key is the highest, raising questions on the credibility of the NTA.
Data shows a total of 12 questions were removed from the JEE Main 2025 Session 1 final answer key, reducing the total number of questions from 90 to 75. In comparison, six questions were removed from JEE Main 2024 Session 1 and four from Session 2.
Six questions were removed in JEE Main 2023 and 2024 Session 1. Five questions were dropped in Session 1 of 2023, while four and six questions were removed in Session 1 and 2 of 2022, respectively.
No questions were removed in the JEE Main 2021 Session 1 and Session 2 exams.
Despite the rise in errors, the agency defended itself, saying this year’s record-low challenge rate and minimal errors reaffirmed its commitment to ensuring a fair, transparent and error-free examination process for engineering aspirants across the country.
ThePrint has sent an email to NTA. The copy will be updated after their response.
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Mistakes in the answer key
Experts said discrepancies in language translation further reduced confidence in the examination process.
At least two translation errors were found in the JEE Main 2025 Session 1 final answer key, leading to confusion. Incorrect answers were later marked correct, creating additional discrepancies.
Students answering in Hindi and Gujarati had two answer options, while others had only one, raising concerns about fairness.
“There were many errors. The NTA did not take any responsibility or provide any clarification on this. They are not giving any solution either,” said Jitender Ahuja, who teaches physics to JEE and NEET students in Delhi.
“As an agency, it is their responsibility to conduct the exam without errors it seems they haven’t learned anything from their past mistakes,” he added.
The inclusion of questions outside the syllabus further reduced trust in the NTA.
According to Jitender, Newton’s law of cooling, which had been removed from the syllabus for the past two years, was included in the Session 1 exam.
He said the Carnot Cycle, removed from the syllabus years ago, appeared unexpectedly in the exam, while Newton’s Law of Cooling had 22 related questions.
Students said there were errors in the physics questions, adding to concerns over the exam’s accuracy.
The mismatch between the syllabus and the actual exam content added to their difficulties. They lost valuable time on incorrectly prepared questions, with some spending 10-15 minutes struggling with unclear problems, which affected performance and ranking.
“This misalignment between the syllabus and the actual exam content further added to students’ distress,” Jitender added.
“Students spent day and night preparing and such incidents make them feel like a fool. There should be some accountability for NTA. If any student wants to recheck the answers they have to pay Rs 200 per question. It is total harassment of the student.”
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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Hello Sir/Ma’am,
I am subscriber to your youtube channel from this email-id. Actually, I am writing this about the court stay (in Rajasthan) on the vacancy of “Information Assistant” which was posted in 16 January 2023 . The total seats are more the 3000. They conducted written exam in Jan,2024 and typing test in 27-29 August 2024.
BJP is saying that they are giving many jobs , but they failed to gave many job postings till now. There is a nexus between court and current BJP govt. Whenever, the date for court proceeding comes either the judge leaves or gives next date by giving the excuse that there is no-one from the DOITC department or RSSB board. Today also,there should be court proceeding at 2 Pm but the judge went on half day leave at 1 pm.
job notication link1: https://rssb.rajasthan.gov.in/storage/news_item/1738147791.pdf
There is word limit
Can someone tell Nootan Sharma to look into this because she covers news for the govt aspirants.