Criticism of the National Testing Agency (NTA), which conducts key competitive examinations across the country, has flared up once again. Having already faced severe backlash over the recent NEET-UG 2026 question paper leak, the NTA now finds itself in trouble once more, this time over serious errors found in the UGC-NET examination papers. After it emerged that several papers contained multiple errors, the NTA officially announced that the English, Commerce, and Sociology examinations would be cancelled and conducted afresh. The English and Commerce papers will be re-conducted on September 9, while the Sociology paper will be held again on September 10. The NTA conducts the UGC-NET examinations to determine eligibility for Assistant Professor positions in universities, PhD admissions, and Junior Research Fellowships.
Candidates were already expressing serious dissatisfaction over the delayed release of the answer key for these examinations, which were held in June across 87 subjects. After the answer key was released, a wave of complaints poured in from candidates alleging that the English, Commerce, and Sociology papers contained a large number of errors. Responding to this, the NTA constituted an expert committee to look into the matter.
Following its review, the committee found several lapses across the three papers, including the names of prominent scholars and books being printed incorrectly, grammatical errors, confusingly worded questions, and questions that had been repeated verbatim from previous examinations. The committee recommended that these three papers be re-conducted in the interest of transparency in the examination process, based on which the NTA took its decision.