New Delhi: The National Testing Agency (NTA) has said it will hold fresh UGC-NET examinations in English, Commerce and Sociology after discovering multiple mistakes in the question papers, intensifying criticism over the agency’s management of competitive examinations.
The English and Commerce papers will be re-held on 9 September, while the Sociology paper will be conducted on 10 September.
The University Grants Commission-National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) is held to assess eligibility for appointment as entry-level Assistant Professor, admission to PhD programmes, and for the award of Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in government and private universities.
This fresh controversy comes only months after the NTA was forced to cancel the NEET-UG 2026 exam over a leaked paper, a move that triggered protests across the country and put the testing body under intense public scrutiny. The agitation, which gathered momentum at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, ultimately pushed Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign from his post.
The June 2026 UGC-NET examination covered 87 subjects, but the NTA had already come under fire for holding back the answer key for weeks before finally releasing it on Sunday, as reported by the Print.
In a statement, the NTA said it received numerous complaints about multiple errors in the English, Commerce and Sociology papers, prompting it to set up a committee to examine the grievances.
“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, the Sociology question paper was riddled with typos, with scholars’ names and key terms mangled — “Ritzer” printed as “Putzer”, “social” as “oval”, and “Nussbaum” as “Nusbaut”, among other errors.
In English and Commerce, candidates claimed that several items were lifted directly from earlier years’ question papers.
