NTA announces retest for three papers of UGC-NET after errors
The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Sunday announced the retest for three papers of the UGC-NET June 2026 examination — English, Commerce and Sociology — following complaints about several errors in these papers.
The English paper will be held on September 9 from 9 am to 12 noon in Shift 1, while the Commerce paper will be conducted the same day from 3 pm to 6 pm in Shift 2. The Sociology paper will be held on September 10 from 9 am to 12 noon in Shift 1.
The NTA conducted the UGC-NET June 2026 examination from June 22 to 30 across 87 subjects for the award of Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), eligibility for assistant professor, and admission to PhD programmes.
In a public notice, the NTA said it had received several complaints about multiple errors in these papers of the three subjects and constituted a committee to look into these issues.
The committee found that the three papers had many factual, typographical, and 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 panel recommended that in the interest of holding a fair and error-free examination, these three papers should be re-conducted, it added.
“It has therefore been concluded by NTA that papers carrying such defects do not meet the standards of fairness and error-free examination, and defects of this extent cannot be cured merely by dropping questions after the challenge process,” the agency said.
It said no additional examination fee will be charged from candidates appearing for the re-test.
Further details regarding the city, examination centre and admit card will be notified separately on the official website, it said.
The NTA said results for the 84 subjects for which Answer Key Challenge was issued earlier today will be declared as per schedule.
“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 re-conduct of the examination for the three subjects,” it said.
The agency said the number of candidates to be qualified for eligibility for Assistant Professor shall be equal to 6 per cent of the candidates who appeared in the test conducted in June 2026, or the retest, whichever is higher.
Similarly, the subject-wise allocation for the remaining three subjects for JRF, eligibility for Assistant Professor and eligibility for admission to PhD will be done as mentioned in the Information Bulletin, it said.
“After the retest, the numbers already allocated for each subject shall not be reduced under any circumstances,” the NTA said.
The agency said it remains committed to conducting examinations that are “fair, accurate and transparent” and advised candidates to rely only on its official websites and official communications.
