'UGC NET Candidates Deserve Better Than Question Papers Riddled With Typos'

I am a PhD scholar at Aligarh Muslim University. Last week, on 30 June, after nearly six months of preparation, I appeared for the Sociology paper of the University Grants Commission-National Eligibility Test (UGC NET) to become eligible for Assistant Professor posts across colleges and universities.But the exam, conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) in the computer-based test mode, was undermined by the errors in the question paper. These were not isolated mistakes, but multiple errors that overshadowed our months of preparation and aspirations.I did not expect spending a significant time during the exam proofreading the question paper. George Ritzer, an American sociologist and professor, appeared as 'Putzer'. Talcott Parsons appeared as 'Parsow', and Martha Nussbaum's second name was misspelt as 'Nusbaut'.These are not minor typos that a reader glosses over. Every time one appeared, I had to stop and ask myself a question no candidate should have to ask in the middle of an exam: Have I misread this or has the paper got it wrong?There were times when the doubt went further than that. Seeing an unfamiliar spelling like 'Putzer' or 'Nusbaut', I genuinely wondered whether this was some new thinker, philosopher, or term I hadn't come across in my preparation, rather than a distorted version of a name I already knew well.The paper contained several other similar mistakes. In some, I knew the correct answer but chose to skip them, while in others the ambiguity led me to mark the wrong answers.I also spent a lot of time trying to understand the questions, which ultimately affected my overall performance in the exam.To fulfil my dream of becoming an Assistant Professor, I need to qualify for the Junior Research Fellow position. Like me, my peers who took the Sociology exam in Hindi were also met with such errors.My friend, Mohammad Asif Khan, who appeared in the same exam in Hindi medium, said the translations of the English paper did not appear in the standard academic language.'My 4-Year Psychology Course at Xavier's Ended in Three. Now I Face a Gap Year'"I found myself mentally translating the translation, before I could even begin answering. It felt as if I was reading an AI translation of the English version," Khan told me.Javed Akhtar, a research scholar, said he had noticed the same misspelt names and the same unclear phrasing. Like me, he found the errors disruptive—he kept having to pause and check whether the confusion was coming from his own understanding of the subject or from a genuine mistake in the paper.It is worth remembering what is actually at stake here. The UGC NET is not a minor random exam. It determines eligibility for Assistant Professorships, the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), and admission to PhD programmes across the country.Thousands of candidates spend months, sometimes years, preparing for it. The least they can expect in return is a question paper that has been properly written, proofread, and translated.If you look closer at the problems, i.e. the misspelt names, the confusing sentence construction, the flawed Hindi translations, this doesn't look like an isolated slip. It looks like a paper that went into the exam hall without adequate proofreading or quality control at the time of its preparation.Candidates should be evaluated on how well they know their subject—on their grasp of Ritzer's theory, Parsons' functionalism, Ghurye's contribution to Indian sociology, Desai's political sociology, or Nussbaum's capability approach—not on their ability to decode a paper riddled with errors. When a national-level exam introduces friction of this kind, it stops testing sociology and starts testing something else entirely: patience with the NTA's own mistakes, given their past records as well.'I Gave 10 Years to French. CBSE's 3-Language Policy Puts My Livelihood at Risk'Because this was a computer-based test, the official question paper along with the provisional answer key is expected to be released in the coming weeks, as is standard NTA practice.I am, in a strange way, looking forward to it because once it is out, these errors will no longer be something candidates simply recall from memory. They will be visible on record, for anyone to check.Honestly, I hope the NTA releases the paper exactly as it was conducted, without quietly cleaning up the spelling mistakes or smoothing out the confusing translations before it goes public.If the errors are corrected retroactively at the release stage, candidates who flagged these problems will have no way to prove what they actually encountered in the exam hall.HPSC Hiring: 'I Qualified for Asst Prof Job. Then the Court Scrapped the Exams'Marking has now become one of my major concerns. These errors have opened doors for answer-key disputes, challenge-window objections, and answers marked right or wrong in ways that don't fairly reflect what candidates actually knew.Blanket grace marks would be unfair, too, and would make the merit list skewed. I am waiting to see what exactly the NTA is going to do about this. Will specific questions be dropped from the evaluation? Will alternate correct answers be accepted to account for the ambiguity? Will there be a transparent review of which questions were affected and why? Or will this quietly disappear into a generic assurance that "all necessary steps have been taken," with no real accountability?I am sharing this account in the hope that the NTA takes these concerns seriously, as evidence of a systemic gap in the preparation of question papers, and tells candidates exactly what it plans to do about the questions that were compromised.(The Quint has reached out to the NTA on the issues raised by the student. The story will be updated when a response is received. Meanwhile, admitting to the errors, NTA sources told India Today, "Typographical errors are not unusual. We came to know about the matter through media reports and social media, and we are looking into it. So far, we have not received any complaints from students.")(All 'My Report' branded stories are submitted by citizen journalists to The Quint and the views expressed above are the citizen journalist's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

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'UGC NET Candidates Deserve Better Than Question Papers Riddled With Typos'

'The Sociology question paper had several misspelt names in English and flawed translations for Hindi candidates.'

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