UGC-NET 2026 blunder: NTA to hold English, Commerce, Sociology re-tests in September. Check dates

Nearly seven weeks after conducting the National Eligibility Test (NET), the National Testing Agency (NTA) acknowledged extensive errors and repeated questions in the UGC-NET question papers for English, Commerce, and Sociology, ordering fresh examinations for all three subjects.

The agency confirmed that the re-tests will be held on September 9 and 10, without charging candidates any additional examination fee. English will take place from 9 am to 12 pm on September 9, Commerce from 3 pm to 6 pm the same day, and Sociology from 9 am to 12 pm on September 10.

The decision arrived hours after the NTA released provisional answer keys for 84 of the 87 UGC-NET subjects while withholding the keys for these three specific disciplines.

A committee constituted after the agency received several complaints uncovered widespread "factual, typographical, translation errors," alongside misspelt names of prominent scholars, garbled book titles, wrongly worded questions, grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and non-standard terms used for established concepts. The panel also cited a repetition of a "significant number" of questions previously asked in past examinations.

Addressing the findings, the agency noted that papers carrying defects of this extent failed to meet the standards of a fair and error-free examination, adding that the problems could not be resolved merely by dropping flawed questions after receiving candidate challenges.

Earlier complaints highlighted that the Sociology paper contained mangled names of thinkers — such as "Ritzer" appearing as "Putzer", "Parsons" as "Parsow", "Ghurye" as "Ghunye", and A R Desai as "A K Desai" — as well as poor Hindi translations and questions seemingly unrelated to the syllabus.

Meanwhile, English candidates alleged that 67 out of 150 questions were identical to those asked in the 2024 examination, down to the exact sequence of answer options. Similar complaints over question repetition subsequently emerged in Commerce as well.

The current re-examination will not delay results across the remaining subjects. The NTA said that results for the other 84 subjects will be declared as scheduled, ensuring no disruption to Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) allocation and eligibility certificates for Assistant Professorships and PhD admissions.

For Assistant Professor eligibility, the agency specified that the qualifying benchmark will be 6% of candidates who appeared in either the June test or the upcoming re-test, whichever yields a higher figure.