NEW DELHI: The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Sunday ordered fresh examinations for UGC-NET papers in English, Commerce and Sociology after a review committee found widespread factual, typographical and translation errors, along with a significant number of repeated questions.The re-examinations will be held on September 9 and 10. The English paper will be conducted from 9am to noon on September 9, followed by Commerce from 3pm to 6pm. The Sociology paper will be held from 9am to noon on September 10. Candidates will not have to pay any additional examination fee.The decision came shortly after NTA released provisional answer keys for 84 of the 87 subjects in the June UGC-NET examination. The answer keys for English, Commerce and Sociology were withheld pending a review of complaints received about the papers.Why were the three papers scrapped?NTA said a committee constituted to examine the complaints found several errors that affected the quality and reliability of the three question papers.These included factual and typographical errors, problems with translations, misspelt names of prominent scholars, incorrectly printed book titles, grammatical and punctuation mistakes, wrongly worded questions and the use of non-standard terminology for established concepts.The committee also found that a “significant number” of questions had been repeated from earlier examinations.NTA said the problems were too extensive to be resolved by simply deleting individual questions after the answer-key challenge process. The agency concluded that the affected papers did not meet the required standards of a fair and error-free examination and decided to conduct them afresh.Sociology paper drew complaintsThe Sociology paper had come under scrutiny soon after the June 30 examination. TOI had reported on July 1 that candidates had flagged several errors in the paper, including spelling and grammatical mistakes, distorted names of prominent thinkers, poor Hindi translations and questions that they alleged were outside the prescribed syllabus.Candidates cited several examples of incorrectly printed names. “Ritzer” appeared as “Putzer”, “Parsons” as “Parsow”, “Ghurye” as “Ghunye” and A R Desai as “A K Desai”, among other errors.Some candidates had also alleged that parts of the Sociology paper appeared to have been AI-generated.67 English questions allegedly repeatedThe English paper faced a different but equally serious complaint. Candidates alleged that 67 of the 150 questions were identical to questions asked in the 2024 UGC-NET examination.They further alleged that the sequence of the answer options was also unchanged in the repeated questions. Complaints about repetition were subsequently raised in the Commerce paper as well.What happens to the other 84 subjects?The re-examination of the three subjects will not delay the results of the remaining 84 UGC-NET subjects, NTA said.The results for these subjects will be declared as scheduled. The allocation of Junior Research Fellowships (JRF) and the issuance of certificates for Assistant Professor and PhD eligibility will also not be delayed.For Assistant Professor eligibility, NTA said 6% of candidates who appeared for the June examination or the re-examination, whichever is higher, would qualify.The latest decision comes two years after the June 2024 UGC-NET examination was cancelled a day after it was conducted. The University Grants Commission had received inputs from the National Cyber Crime Threat Analytics Unit under the Union home ministry indicating that the integrity of the examination may have been compromised. The examination was subsequently conducted afresh.
