E-Paper
'Putzer for Ritzer, Parsow for Parsons': What are the typos, errors that forced NTA to cancel 3 UGC-NET papers?
Candidates and coaching teachers alleged several questions were repeated from the earlier UGC-NET cycles, particularly December 2024 and 2025.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Sunday said it will re-conduct the University Grants Commission National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) examination for three papers, after “multiple errors” were found in the exam conducted from June 22 to June 30 this year.
These errors included spelling mistakes, repetition of questions from previous years, and repeated option sequences. The exams that will be reconducted are Sociology, English, and Commerce.
UGC-NET is conducted to determine the eligibility of candidates for the posts of Assistant Professor and admission to PhD programmes. The NTA’s decision marks the cancellation of a second major exam by the agency this year, after the May 3 NEET-UG 2026 exam was scrapped following a paper leak that sparked nationwide protests.
Deep Dive
Here is a breakdown of the kind of errors that forced NTA to reconduct the UGC-NET exams:
The errors
- Sociology: Candidates flagged several spelling errors, including “Ritzer” appearing as “Putzer”, “Ghurye” as “Ghunye”, “Parsons” as “Parsow” and “Nussbaum” as “Nusbaut”, among others.
- English: Candidates and coaching teachers alleged that several questions were repeated from earlier UGC-NET cycles, particularly December 2024 and 2025. Questions were reportedly lifted verbatim, including those on the publication year of Kanthapura, the author of The Life Divine, genre-based classifications such as The Time Machine and Brave New World, and “Match the Following” questions involving critics such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. Questions on the chronology of William Shakespeare’s plays and specialised literary concepts such as Ecocriticism and the Flâneur were also repeated, with the multiple-choice options in the same sequence.
- Commerce: Students taking the Commerce exam also alleged that questions were repeated from previous exam cycles. These pertained to specific corporate tax provisions, such as Arm's Length Pricing and TDS provisions under Sections 194C and 194F, as well as accounting questions that used identical numerical data for break-even analysis and Margin of Safety. Questions on capital structure theories, including the Modigliani-Miller Hypothesis, and the extended 7 Ps of Service Marketing were also reportedly repeated with the same multiple-choice sequences.
What NTA said
In a statement, the NTA said it had formed a committee to oversee several complaints of errors in the English, Commerce and Sociology question papers.
“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 Committee recommended that, in the interest of holding a fair and error-free examination, these three papers should be re-conducted,” it said.
When will the exams be conducted?
The NTA statement said that the English paper will be held from 9am to noon on September 9, followed by the Commerce paper from 3pm to 6pm the same day.
The Sociology paper will be held on September 10 from 9am to noon, the agency said.
“Further details of the city, centre and admit card details will be notified separately on the official website. No additional examination fee will be charged from the candidates of these three subjects for the re-conduct,” it added.
The UGC-NET examination comprises two papers: Paper I, which includes 50 questions on teaching aptitude, reasoning ability, and general awareness, and Paper II, which contains 100 subject-related multiple-choice questions.
