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ew Delhi, August 16: Nine months of preparation, one bad question paper, and now a second exam to sit through. That's the reality facing thousands of UGC-NET aspirants after the National Testing Agency announced on Sunday that it would re-conduct the English, Commerce and Sociology papers of the June 2026 cycle.
The English and Commerce re-tests are set for September 9. Sociology follows a day later, on September 10. All three were part of a larger exam conducted across 87 subjects between June 22 and 30, an exercise meant to determine eligibility for assistant professorships, PhD admissions and Junior Research Fellowships for over a million candidates nationwide.
It started, as these things often do now, with screenshots on X.
Candidates who sat the Sociology paper on June 30 began posting side-by-side comparisons almost immediately. The name of sociologist George Ritzer had apparently been printed as "Putzer". Talcott Parsons became "Parsow." G.S. Ghurye turned into "Ghunye," and Martha Nussbaum was rendered "Nusbaut". Even the word "social" reportedly showed up as "oval" in places.
One candidate, Antara Chakrabarty, wrote that the paper had "crossed all limits of academic deceit and accountability". She wasn't alone in that sentiment. Others flagged a question asking test-takers to arrange former Union education ministers chronologically, arguing it tested general knowledge trivia rather than sociological understanding.
The English paper drew a different kind of scrutiny. According to a Telegraph report cited by several outlets, 67 of 150 questions matched material from the January 2025 UGC-NET exam almost word for word, right down to the sequence of answer options. For an exam meant to test fresh command of the subject, recycled questions raised obvious fairness concerns for anyone who happened to have seen the earlier paper.
NTA didn't respond publicly when the complaints first surfaced in early July. But behind the scenes, it had formed a committee to go through the objections subject by subject.
That committee's findings, released Sunday, more or less confirmed what candidates had been saying for weeks. It found factual errors, typos, and translation problems scattered across all three papers, along with garbled book titles and mistakes in how questions were worded in Hindi. The panel apparently decided the damage was too widespread to fix through the usual answer-key challenge process, where individual disputed questions simply get dropped from scoring.
So a full re-conduct it is.
Candidates already registered for these three subjects won't need to pay again. NTA has confirmed there's no additional exam fee for the September sittings, and roll numbers and exam cities are expected to stay the same as before, though admit card details will be shared closer to the date.
Crucially, the agency was quick to clarify that this doesn't hold up anything else. Provisional answer keys for the remaining 84 subjects were released the same day, and the challenge window for those is already open. JRF allocations, PhD eligibility certificates, and assistant professor eligibility for those subjects will proceed on the original timeline.
For an agency that's spent the past two years trying to rebuild trust, this lands at an awkward moment.
UGC-NET June 2024 was scrapped entirely after cyber-crime officials flagged that the paper may have leaked onto Telegram, a scandal that broke barely weeks after the NEET-UG controversy engulfed the same agency. That episode ended with a CBI investigation and a government-appointed panel reviewing how NTA functions. The 2024 answer-key process afterward brought its own round of complaints, with history candidates alone claiming over 60 errors.
This time there's no leak, no CBI, no cancelled national exam. But the underlying complaint is familiar: papers going out with mistakes that shouldn't have survived basic proofreading, and students left to spot them after the fact.
For most of the roughly nine lakh candidates who sat the June cycle, nothing changes. Their results move forward as planned.
For those in English, Commerce and Sociology, it means another exam date to prepare for, on top of a summer many had already put behind them. NTA says further details, including admit cards, will follow in the coming weeks.
The National Testing Agency will re-conduct the UGC-NET June 2026 papers for English, Commerce and Sociology on September 9 and 10, after a committee confirmed multiple errors, including misspelt scholars' names, faulty Hindi translations, and dozens of repeated questions in the English paper. No extra fee will be charged, and results for the other 84 subjects tested in June will proceed on schedule. The episode adds to a rocky recent history for NTA, which cancelled the entire UGC-NET exam in 2024 following a leak allegation.
