Three UGC-NET June 2026 papers are being held again. The National Testing Agency (NTA) will re-conduct the English, Commerce and Sociology papers in September after a review found the original question papers riddled with mistakes. Candidates who sat for these three subjects don’t have to pay anything extra, and they won’t need to re-apply.
The UGC-NET June 2026 exam was held from 22 to 30 June 2026 across 87 subjects. It decides three things for candidates: the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), eligibility for Assistant Professor posts, and admission to PhD programmes.
Why the UGC-NET June 2026 re-exam was ordered
NTA received several complaints about errors in the English, Commerce and Sociology papers. A committee was set up to examine them. What it found was long: factual and typographical slips, translation errors, misspelt names of well-known scholars, garbled book titles, faulty wording in the question stems, grammatical mistakes, gender and number agreement errors, punctuation problems, and oddly coined terms for concepts that already have standard names. A number of questions had also been repeated from earlier exams.
The committee’s view was blunt. Papers with defects on this scale cannot be fixed by simply dropping questions after the answer key challenge. To keep the exam fair, the three papers had to be conducted afresh.
UGC-NET re-exam September 2026 schedule
| Subject | Date | Shift | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | 9 September 2026 | Shift 1 | 9 AM to 12 Noon |
| Commerce | 9 September 2026 | Shift 2 | 3 PM to 6 PM |
| Sociology | 10 September 2026 | Shift 1 | 9 AM to 12 Noon |
City, centre and admit card details will come in a separate notice on the official website. No extra exam fee will be charged for the re-conduct.
What happens to the other 84 subjects
Results for the 84 subjects that went through the Answer Key Challenge will be declared on schedule. NTA has said the allocation of JRF seats and the issue of e-certificates for Assistant Professor eligibility and PhD admission for these 84 subjects will not be held up because of the re-exam in the other three.
Here is how the numbers work for candidates. The count qualifying for Assistant Professor eligibility will equal 6% of the candidates who appeared in the June 2026 test or the retest, whichever is higher. For the three re-conducted subjects, the subject-wise allocation for JRF, Assistant Professor eligibility and PhD admission will follow the Information Bulletin, and the numbers already allotted for each subject will not be cut after the retest.
NTA has asked candidates to trust only its official websites, https://www.nta.ac.in/ and https://ugcnet.nta.nic.in/, and its official messages. Watch these for the admit card and centre details before the September dates.