The National Testing Agency (NTA) announced on Sunday that a retest will be held for over 1,000 candidates of the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) Undergraduate (UG) 2024. The retest is scheduled for July 19, 2024. While the new date for the retest has been announced, the NTA has remained silent about the result date, which has already been delayed by two weeks. On July 7, 2024, the NTA released a provisional answer key for the CUET-UG 2024 and declared that a retest would be conducted for affected candidates. The retest was originally slated to take place between July 15 and 19, but was contingent upon the validity of grievances raised by students regarding the exam’s conduct. According to reports from the Press Trust of India (PTI), question papers in languages not opted for by the candidates were distributed, leading to the retest. Over 1,000 candidates from six states were affected by this issue. A source cited by PTI revealed that some grievances involved time loss due to the distribution of incorrect question papers. Among the 1,000 CUET-UG aspirants who will retake the exam, around 250 are from Oasis Public School in Hazaribagh. This school is currently under investigation for an alleged leak of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET)-UG question paper. The official notification released on Sunday stated that all grievances received from candidates up to June 30, 2024, and complaints sent to rescuetug@nta.ac.in between July 7 and 9 (before 5pm) were reviewed. The notification further clarified that based on these grievances, a re-examination will be conducted for the affected candidates on July 19, 2024, in the Computer-Based Test (CBT) mode. The CUET-UG exams, conducted for the first time in a hybrid mode across the country, faced disruptions in Delhi. The exam was cancelled in the national capital the night before the scheduled date due to logistical reasons, and was later conducted in Delhi. The NTA had initially announced that the third edition of CUET-UG would be completed within seven days without any score normalization, as all exams were to be conducted in a single shift. The exams were held in pen-paper mode for 15 subjects and computer-based mode (CBT) for 48 subjects. Over 13.4 lakh candidates registered for the common entrance test for admission to undergraduate courses in 261 central, state, deemed and private universities this year. The first edition of the exam was held in 2022, and faced several technical issues. Scores had to be normalized as the test was held across multiple shifts.
