Nta Ugc Net Re Exam Dates Sociology English Commerce Exam What The Delay Means Admission Timelines Missed Goals Education Ministry

It seems India’s premier testing agency cannot catch a break this exam season. Months after the NEET paper-leak controversy, UGC NET looks set to be the next flashpoint. The National Testing Agency (NTA) finally released answer keys for 84 subjects on Sunday, over a month after the June exam was held, and in the same breath, cancelled three of its own papers. English, Commerce and Sociology are all headed for a retest on September 9 and 10, after a review committee found the original papers riddled with “factual, typographical and translation errors.” For thousands of students, this means the exam that was meant to close out their June cycle is starting all over again, just as admissions, fellowships and academic years hang in the balance.

This is only the second time since NTA’s inception that the National Eligibility Test (NET) has needed to be redone. The last was in 2024, when the pen-and-paper session was scrapped amid allegations of a leak. This time, students say they flagged problems the moment they walked out of the exam hall in June: errors in the questions, spelling mistakes, and for many, a paper that was allegedly circulating online before results were even due. NTA took over 45 days to act, and only after sustained pressure did it acknowledge what candidates had been saying from day one. As one aspirant put it, “They are not even trying, at this point.”

For candidates like Dayita Samanta, 24, a graduate from a public university in Delhi now appearing in UGC-NET to crack Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), the frustration runs deeper than the errors themselves. She noticed the English paper felt familiar the moment she started. “I felt like I’ve seen them before,” she says, and later tallied close to 66 to 70 questions repeated word for word from the December 2024 paper, comprehension passages included.

Now she has barely 20 days to re-prepare, arrange travel back to her exam centre, and hopes NTA doesn’t repeat 2024’s stance of not letting candidates shift centres after they’d already moved cities, logistics she describes simply as “exhausting.” The stakes go beyond the exam itself. Even institutions like IIT Delhi, she says, quietly told candidates after beginning their intake process that only JRF holders would be shortlisted, sidelining anyone who’d qualified through other routes like GATE. Calling it out, she says, “it was a very arbitrary thing that they said.” While IIT Delhi’s broader PhD eligibility rules do indeed recognise routes including GATE, individual departments can set their own shortlisting criteria, making the distinction between being eligible to apply and actually being shortlisted unclear if candidates are not informed in time.

Last year, that process was done by the end of July. This year, with results now expected by October at the earliest, the admission cycle is likely to spill later into the year, something that candidates fear, eating directly into the three-year window her JRF qualification is valid for. Some departments admit students just once a year, so missing this cycle doesn’t mean waiting a few months. It means losing an entire year. “My one full year is just gone,” she explained.

Underneath the logistics sits a deeper issue: nobody quite knows what to prepare for. Students describe weeks of not knowing whether NTA would acknowledge the leak, whether results for the three subjects would trail behind everyone else’s, or whether studying was worth it given how little the papers tested actual subject knowledge.

That uncertainty has worn many down to the point of dreading the retake rather than welcoming it.

Yashita Gupta, 25, originally from Kanpur, has been vying for a JRF position since 2024. This is her sixth attempt, and she’s not sure she has it in her to sit for a seventh come this September. She was only recently diagnosed with fibromyalgia (a long-term medical condition that causes widespread body pain and other problems), and had appeared for the June exam through a high fever and one of the worst migraine attacks she’d had in years, only to open the paper and question whether she was hallucinating the errors on the page.

“Am I hallucinating, or are these thinkers whom I don’t know?” she remembers thinking, given the number of repeated questions, mistaken names of authors and sociologists. When she learned about the retake, she said she couldn’t sleep or plan for her course of study for the re-test. Her first reaction was blunt: “I’m not going to do it.” She’s staying in the race mostly because her family has stood by her through her illness, something she knows isn’t the case for everyone around her.

Deepto Banerjee is a Senior Sub Editor at The Indian Express (Digital), specialising in education policy, career guidance, and student affairs. He is an IIMC New Delhi alumnus. ... Read More