[REVISION HISTORY]

UGC NET June 2026 answer key and re-exam announcement

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2026-08-17 08:35 UTC → 2026-08-17 12:07 UTC · added ~~removed~~

On 16 August 2026, the National Testing Agency (NTA) released provisional answer keys, response sheets, and question papers for the UGC-NET, CSIR-NET, and ICAR AIEEA (PG) and AICE (PhD) June 2026 examinations. This release follows significant criticism from student unions, such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, regarding delays that threatened PhD admissions and research opportunities. While provisional keys for 84 subjects of the UGC NET were made available, the NTA has withheld the answer keys for English, Commerce, and Sociology due to complaints regarding errors in the question papers. Following an investigation by an expert committee, the NTA determined that the defects—including factual inaccuracies, typographical mistakes, translation errors, grammatical or numerical discrepancies, garbled book titles, misspelt scholar names, non-standard terminology, and the repetition of questions from previous exams—were too significant to be resolved by simply omitting affected questions. Consequently, the NTA has ordered the re-conduct of the examinations for these three subjects to ensure fairness and maintain the integrity of the process used for Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), Assistant Professor eligibility, and PhD admissions. The re-examination schedule is set for English and Commerce on 9 September 2026, and Sociology on 10 September 2026. Candidates appearing for these re-tests will not be required to pay an additional examination fee. The re-examination will not affect the results for the other 84 subjects. The announcement has drawn sharp criticism from opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, who described the current examination framework as an ‘extraction machine’ that consumes students' time, money, and mental health. He further questioned whether the papers had been leaked and called for greater accountability within the NTA leadership. Additionally, the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) has called for nationwide protests, demanding greater accountability and a judicial inquiry into the agency’s repeated failures.

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