UGC NET 2026: NTA Cancels English, Commerce And Sociology Papers; Re-Exam In September

New Delhi: National Testing Agency (NTA) has made a decision to conduct fresh UGC-NET examination for English, Commerce and Sociology subjects after the committee who reviewed complaints of the candidates found multiple problems in the question papers including mistakes in spelling and questions repeated from previous years.

What did the NTA say?

On Sunday, the NTA announced that a committee found multiple errors in the question papers, and a re-examination will be conducted for the three subjects.

“NTA had received several complaints on multiple errors in these papers,” the agency said.

What are the new dates and timings of exam?

The NTA announced that the UGC-NET exam for English, Commerce, and Sociology will take place again in September. The English paper will take place on September 9 from 9 am to 12 noon, followed by the Commerce paper from 3 pm to 6 pm on the same day, while the Sociology paper will be held on September 10 from 9 am to 12 noon.

What is the reason of re-exam?

The agency said information regarding examination cities, centres and admit cards would be released separately on its official website. Candidates appearing for the re-examination in these three subjects will not have to pay any additional examination fee, it noted.

“The Committee found that the three papers had many factual, typographical, 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 NTA said.

"The Committee recommended that, in the interest of holding a fair and error-free examination, these three papers should be re-conducted. 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," it said.

When did NTA release answer keys?

The NTA announced this decision after the answer keys for 84 of the 87 UGC NET exam subjects had been released. Students have been given until 11:59 pm on August 18th to submit their objections. The NTA released the UGC NET answer keys after students threatened to protest.