India orders fresh UGC-NET exams for English, Commerce and Sociology after paper errors
India’s testing agency has ordered a re-exam for three UGC-NET subjects after finding widespread mistakes in the question papers.
India’s testing agency has ordered a re-exam for three UGC-NET subjects after finding widespread mistakes in the question papers. English, Commerce and Sociology will now be held again next month.
The National Testing Agency said on Sunday that the defects were too extensive to fix just by removing questions after the answer-key challenge window. The retests are set for September 9 and 10, with no extra fee for candidates.
What went wrong
The agency said it received several complaints and then formed a committee to review the papers. That panel found many factual, typographical and translation errors, along with misspelt names of prominent scholars, garbled book titles, badly worded questions, grammar and punctuation mistakes, and non-standard terms for established concepts.
It also found a significant number of repeated questions from earlier examinations. That finding helped push the agency toward a full re-conduct rather than a paper-by-paper correction.
UGC-NET is used to determine eligibility for Assistant Professor posts and admission to PhD programmes. The exam was held from June 22 to June 30 across 87 subjects.
Re-test dates and timings
English will be held from 9 a.m. to noon on September 9. Commerce will follow the same day from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sociology is scheduled for September 10, also from 9 a.m. to noon.
The decision came hours after NTA released provisional answer keys for 84 of the 87 subjects, while withholding the keys for the three papers now being re-conducted. The agency had waited nearly seven weeks after the June examination to move on the answer-key process.
Why it matters
The order adds to the pressure on NTA, which has already faced scrutiny this year after the May 3 NEET-UG 2026 exam was scrapped following a paper leak. That cancellation triggered nationwide protests and renewed questions over exam security and paper-setting standards.
For candidates who sat the three affected UGC-NET papers, the fresh exam offers another shot. For NTA, the re-test is a blunt acknowledgement that the original papers did not meet the mark. The agency said the committee recommended re-conducting the subjects in the interest of a fair, error-free examination.
The new tests come on September 9 and 10, with English first and Sociology last.
