New Delhi: The National Testing Agency (NTA) has announced that it will re-conduct the UGC-NET papers for English, Commerce and Sociology after multiple errors were found in the question papers, adding to the growing criticism over its handling of competitive examinations.
The English and Commerce exam will be re-conducted 9 September, while Sociology will be held 10 September.
The University Grants Commission-National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) is conducted to determine eligibility for appointment of entry Assistant Professor, admission to PhD courses, and for the award of Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in government and private universities.
The latest controversy comes months after the NTA cancelled the NEET-UG 2026 examination following a paper leak, triggering nationwide protests and putting the agency under intense public scrutiny. The protests, with their epicentre at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, eventually led to the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
The UGC-NET 2026 examination was conducted in June across 87 subjects. The NTA had already faced criticism over the delay in releasing the answer key, which was finally released Sunday.
According to a NTA statement, it has received several complaints on multiple errors in the papers of English, Commerce and Sociology, following which it formed a committee to look into the complaints.
“The Committee found that the three papers had 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 agency said.
“The Committee recommended that, in the interest of holding a fair and error-free examination, these three papers should be re-conducted.”
According to candidates, various spelling errors were found in the Sociology paper including “Ritzer” appeared as “Putzer”, social appeared as “oval”, and “Nussbaum” as “Nusbaut”, among others. Similarly, in English and Commerce, candidates alleged that several questions were repeated from previous question papers
(Edited by Tony Rai)