New Delhi: As the National Testing Agency (NTA) faces public ire over re-examination for UGC-NET papers of three subjects after multiple errors were found in the question papers, the examination conducting body stated that it is proactively identifying issues and correcting them transparently in the interest of students, sources said Monday.
Earlier Sunday, the NTA announced that it will re-conduct the University Grants Commission-National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) for English, Sociology and Commerce after several errors were found in the question papers. This added to the growing criticism over the testing agency’s handling of competitive exams.
The NTA conducted a series of national examinations between June and July this year. The examinations for which answer keys are being processed together span three major examinations, UGC-NET, CSIR-NET and ICAR (AIEEA-PG and AICE-PhD), conducted across 184 subjects and papers in all, comprising 24,700 distinct questions. Over 10 lakh candidates registered for the examination, and of these nearly 8 lakh appeared.
Sources stated that each of these questions has to be set, moderated, translated, typeset, administered and evaluated to a common standard. They further stated that given the sheer breadth of subjects and the volume of unique questions, one can grasp the sense of the scale and complexity of the process.
According to the sources, across this very large and varied body of work, no issue was found in the vast majority of subjects. Notably, for 84 UGC-NET subjects, all 5 CSIR-NET and 92 ICAR subjects — which comprise 181 subjects of the total 184 — the papers were found to be in order, and their answer keys were published Sunday. However, issues were identified in three of the 87 UGC-NET subjects — English, Sociology and Commerce — and the answer keys for the same were held back as the testing agency is focusing on corrective measures.
“The position on these three, including their re-conduct, has been notified separately,” sources said, adding that the Sociology paper will be held September 10, while the English and Commerce tests will be re-conducted September 9.
The task of an examination-conducting agency is not only to conduct error-free examinations, but also to act promptly and honestly whenever an anomaly is found, sources said, adding that in the case of these three subjects, the “NTA examined the papers, took the opinion of subject-matter experts, and decided to re-conduct those three papers rather than allow papers with defects to stand”.
In doing so, sources said that the NTA has taken the “responsibility of acknowledging that something had gone wrong in these papers and of taking corrective action, at cost to itself, rather than papering over the problem”.
People familiar with the matter said that re-conducting a paper is “undoubtedly hard on the candidates” of the affected subjects, and the NTA is conscious of that. Therefore, the NTA has announced that the re-test will be held at no additional fee, and the number of qualifying candidates and the subject-wise allocations for those subjects will not be reduced.
“More fundamentally, the correction is in the larger interest of the honest, hard-working candidate. When a paper carries errors, or repeats a large number of questions from an earlier cycle, it is the candidate who prepared sincerely on merit who is placed at a disadvantage relative to one who happened to have seen the earlier paper. Setting the paper right protects exactly those candidates who did the work,” the NTA sources said.
They further stated that the corrective measures taken go beyond the three papers, as the NTA is using this experience to further strengthen its internal processes and protocols at the stages of setting, moderating, translating and composing question papers, so that such errors can be prevented at source, and to fix responsibility for the lapses that have occurred.
“The willingness to identify problems proactively, to admit them, and to act, even where action is difficult, is itself the foundation of a more accountable examination system. An agency that conducts examinations at this scale will occasionally encounter problems; what defines its credibility is that it finds them, owns them, and corrects them in the interest of candidates,” sources stated.
In sum, sources stated that the NTA conducted examinations across 184 subjects and 24,700 questions, found that several people have sound issues in the examination of English, Sociology and Commerce. They added that the testing agency proactively identified issues and is committed to correcting them transparently, in the interest of the candidates, to ensure that a “fair, accurate and error-free examination system” is established.
“This combination of scale, vigilance and accountability is the case for confidence in the process, not against it,” they added.