The National Testing Agency (NTA) has once again come under criticism after UGC-NET aspirants alleged that the Sociology paper conducted on June 30 contained numerous spelling mistakes, incorrect names of prominent sociologists, poor Hindi translations, and questions that appeared to be outside the prescribed syllabus.
One of the candidates, Antara Chakrabarty, raised the issue on X, alleging that the examination "crossed all limits of academic accountability." She claimed the paper contained significant language errors that made several questions difficult to comprehend.
Chakrabarty further alleged that some questions appeared to be AI-generated and included references to random thinkers and books that were not part of the UGC-NET Sociology syllabus.
Highlighting what she described as widespread errors, the aspirant claimed that nearly half of the paper contained spelling mistakes and grammatically incorrect sentence construction. According to her, sociologist George Ritzer's name appeared as "Putzer", "social" was printed as "oval", Talcott Parsons was written as "Parsow", G. S. Ghurye as "Ghunye", A. R. Desai as "A. K. Desai", and Martha Nussbaum as "Nusbaut". She also alleged that the Hindi translations were poorly framed and difficult to understand.
Didn't think I would have to reopen X after this long for something this pathetic. The recent NTA NET Sociology exam held on 30th June'26 crossed all limits of academic deceit and accountability. Not even getting started on the irregularity of the paper asking AI generated…
— Antara Chakrabarty | অন্তরা (@ant_taraa) July 1, 2026
"Students could not even understand the questions, let alone attempt them. Half the time went in literally making sense of what nonsense was scribbled in the name of a paper like NET which is supposed to make you eligible for Assistant Professor recruitment and PhD admissions," she wrote.
Questioning the quality of the examination, Chakrabarty asked the NTA, "How low are you willing to go to make Indian higher education drown? We cannot, at any cost, accept this paper."
Responding to concerns regarding errors found in the UGC-NET Sociology paper and the repetition of questions in the English paper, a senior NTA official said, "Students need to challenge the questions in the paper and submit formal queries to us."
"NTA promises to look into the errors. We received 10,000 challenges from students regarding the Re-NEET exam paper. One question was retracted after the challenge was found to be valid. We will do the same for UGC-NET as well, but students need to submit their grievances formally through the grievance redressal portal."
The official also said, "Questions are repeated; it's not something that doesn't happen every year. Typographical errors also occur. Professors set the question papers; NTA does not even review them. We encourage students to challenge the questions, and our teams will look into their concerns."
