The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Sunday decided to hold fresh UGC-NET exams for English, Commerce and Sociology after a committee reviewing candidates’ complaints identified multiple issues in the question papers, including spelling and typographical mistakes and questions allegedly repeated from earlier examinations.

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

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 in a statement.

It added, “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.”

(This is a developing story. More to come)