A students’ organisation on Thursday condemned irregularities such as large-scale repetition of questions in different subject papers of the National Eligibility Test (NET), conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), and demanded an inquiry.
In a statement, the Students Federation of India (SFI) also criticised the testing body under the control of the ministry of education (MoE) over spelling errors in the sociology paper in the NET held last month.
In the English subject paper, 67 of the 150 questions were the same as the English paper of the NET held in December 2024. All the questions allegedly lifted from the old paper are in Paper 2, which has 100 questions related to the subject. Some of the questions are about lines from poems and passages. Even the sequence of the answer options has been kept intact in the question paper.
Questions have been repeated in commerce and geography papers too, the SFI statement issued by its president Adarsh M. Saji and
secretary Srijan Bhattacharyya said.
“In commerce, over 80 questions were allegedly repeated from the same paper, while geography candidates reported the repetition of more than 40 questions from earlier examinations. Such large-scale repetition fundamentally compromises the
integrity, fairness and academic credibility of a national-level examination,” said
the statement.
The SFI alleged that the sociology question paper was riddled with spelling errors, incorrect names and questions that appeared disconnected from the prescribed syllabus.
The SFI said candidates had pointed out after the exam that questions on key concepts and thinkers in sociology had many garbled phrasings. For example, “Ritzer” appeared as “Putzer”, “Parsons” as “Parsow”, and “AR Desai” as “AK Desai”, among many other errors.
The SFI demanded the scrapping of the NTA and the sacking of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. It also sought a judicial or independent inquiry into the irregularities in the NET.
The Telegraph has sent an email to Abhishek Singh, the director-general of the NTA, for his comment on the controversy. His response is awaited.
