With the National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelling the error-ridden English, commerce, and sociology papers of the UGC-NET, the Union government has found itself facing fresh questions on its promised systemic corrections. The agency has announced retests for the examinations held in June. The UGC-NET is an eligibility test for admission to PhD programmes and Junior Research Fellowships, and appointment as assistant professors. When complaints arose about mistakes in the question papers, the NTA appointed a committee to examine them. The committee’s report is revealing. It highlighted multiple factual, typographical, grammatical, and translation errors, misspelt names, and garbled book titles. Many questions were repeated from earlier tests. Last week, the agency released the provisional answer keys for the 84 other subjects; the challenge window closed on Tuesday. The NTA, in its notice announcing the retests on September 9 and 10, said 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.”
It is important that this fiasco comes a few weeks after student protests over the NEET paper leaks ousted education minister Dharmendra Pradhan and forced the Union government into a commitment to strengthening the agency and revamping the examination system with greater vigil and stronger deterrence against potential breaches. Among the promised reforms were the use of the best technology for surveillance, fool-proof security for question papers, and changes designed for greater institutional and personnel efficiency. The government said it would implement the recommendations made by the Radhakrishnan Committee, which was set up after the 2024 NEET paper leak. It also enacted a more stringent legislation to deal with examination fraud and related issues. The tests in June may not offer the right measure of these new interventions, but this failure underlines the arduous task ahead for the agency.
Officials at multiple levels contributed to the failure. Will action be taken against them under the new law? Thousands of young people have been inconvenienced by the cancellation of the examinations, triggering uncertainty at a time marked by anxieties over shrinking opportunities. The confidence of the country’s youth in the system has suffered repeated blows. The NTA claims to have removed 600 experts and brought in a new set of specialists, but it remains to be seen if these measures go beyond their ad hoc utility. The larger institutional objective must be an overhaul, ensuring absolute integrity of the system. (Source: DH)
