The National Testing Agency (NTA) has announced that it will re-conduct the UGC-NET exams for English, Sociology, and Commerce due to multiple complaints from candidates about errors in the question papers for these subjects. The re-exams for English and Commerce will be conducted on September 9, while the Sociology re-exam will take place on September 10.
The NTA conducted the UGC-NET exam in 87 subjects during the last week of June for recruitment to posts of Assistant Professors and Junior Research Fellowships, as well as PhD admissions. However, after the exams, the agency received several complaints about multiple errors in the question papers, including large-scale question repetitions from past years, severe spelling mistakes, poor translations, and garbled scholar names in the Sociology paper.
According to NTA Director Abhishek Singh, a committee was formed to review the complaints and concluded that the exams needed to be re-conducted. The committee found that the three papers had many factual, typographical, and translation errors, including misspelt names of prominent scholars, garbled book titles, and errors in the stem wording of questions.
The NTA has stated that the re-exams will be conducted in the interest of holding a fair and error-free examination. The agency has also assured that no additional examination fee will be charged from the candidates of these three subjects for the re-conduct. Further details of city, centre, and admit card details will be notified separately on the official website.
The results for the 84 subjects for which the Answer Key Challenge was issued earlier will be declared as per schedule. The allocation of JRF seats and issuance of e-certificates for eligibility for Assistant Professor and for admission to PhD for these 84 subjects will not be delayed due to the re-conduct of the examination for the three subjects.
The NTA has also clarified that the number of candidates to be qualified for eligibility for Assistant Professor shall be equal to 6% of the candidates who appeared in the test conducted in June 2026, or the retest, whichever is higher.
