NTA administers CUET-UG retest to 1,000 candidates on 19 July

On July 19, the National Testing Agency (NTA) will retest more than a thousand CUET UG candidates.

The Common University Entrance Test (CUET)-UG 2024 tentative answer key was made available by the NTA on July 7. Additionally, the organization declared that if any student complaints against the exam's administration were validated, CUET UG candidates would be given another chance to retake the test between July 15 and July 19.

Although the agency announced the retest schedule on Sunday, it did not release any information regarding the result announcement, which has been postponed for more than two weeks, nor did it notify the final answer key.

The CUET-UG results are being delayed amid a heated dispute concerning purported anomalies in competitive tests, such as NEET and NET.

According to NTA sources, one of the reasons for the retest is that the question papers were distributed in a language that the candidates had not chosen, and the roughly a thousand candidates were dispersed around six states.

"Some of the grievances include time loss due to distribution of wrong question paper," according to a source.

Of the 1,000 CUET-UG applicants for whom the NTA is administering a retest, 250 are from Oasis Public School in Hazaribagh. This school is also being investigated for the purported leak of NEET-UG question papers.

The complaints submitted to rescuetug@nta.ac.in between July 7-9 (before 5:00 P.M.) and the grievances received from candidates up until June 30, 2024, regarding the CUET (UG) 2024 exam have been reviewed, according to the official notification released on Sunday.

"Based on these grievances, a re-examination will be conducted for those affected candidates on July 19, 2024, in the Computer-Based Test (CBT) mode," the announcement stated.

During the NEET-UG exam on May 5, incorrect question papers were also distributed. As a result, NTA awarded grace marks for time lost.

But after opposition and Supreme Court intervention, the agency canceled the grace marks and gave the 1,563 applicants—of whom 813 showed up for the exam on June 23—the option to retake it.

The NTA postponed the announcement of the undergraduate admission test results because it was investigating claims of paper leaks about NEET-UG, UGC-NET, and CSIR-UGC-NET. The results were originally supposed to be announced on June 30.

"At first, it was determined that the remaining candidates' results would be revealed before the retest and then for the remaining applicants. We haven't decided on the matter yet, though," the person stated.

A night before the planned exam day, the CUET-UG exam in Delhi, which was administered in a hybrid format for the first time in the nation, was canceled due to logistical issues. Later, the exam was held in the nation's capital.

The third edition of CUET-UG will be finished in seven days, according to a previous announcement from the NTA. Since all tests will be given in a single shift, there won't be any score normalization. Tests were administered in two formats: on paper for 15 participants and on a computer for the other 48.

This year, more than 13.4 lakh applicants registered for the common entrance exam to be considered for admission to undergraduate programs at 261 private, state, deemed, and central institutions.

Technical issues beset the exam in its initial administration in 2022. Furthermore, because a subject's exams were administered over several shifts, the scores had to be normalized when the results were announced.