NTA announces September re-test for three UGC-NET papers
The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Sunday, August 16, announced a 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, according to the agency.
The NTA had 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 the three papers and constituted a committee to look into the issues.
The committee found that the papers contained numerous factual, typographical and translation errors including misspelt names of prominent scholars, garbled book titles, errors in the wording of question stems, grammatical mistakes, gender and number agreement errors, punctuation errors, and non-standard coined terms for established concepts besides a significant repetition of questions administered previously, the agency said.
The panel recommended that the three papers be re-conducted in the interest of holding a fair and error-free examination, 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.
The NTA said no additional examination fee would be charged from candidates appearing for the retest, and that further details regarding the city, examination centre and admit card would be notified separately on its official website.
The agency said results for the 84 subjects for which the Answer Key Challenge was issued earlier in the day would be declared as scheduled. "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 number of candidates qualifying for assistant professor eligibility will be equal to 6 per cent of those who appeared in the June 2026 test or the retest, whichever is higher, the NTA said, adding that subject-wise allocation for the three subjects concerned would be done as per the Information Bulletin.
"After the retest, the numbers already allocated for each subject shall not be reduced under any circumstances," the agency said.
The NTA said it remained committed to conducting examinations that are "fair, accurate and transparent" and advised candidates to rely only on its official websites and official communications.
(Inputs from PTI)