Is UGC-NET failing India's scholars and researchers?

Year after year, the same story repeats. Exams end, but instead of relief, there's disillusionment. The UGC-NET June 2025 cycle is over and once again, what lingers in the air isn’t hope, it's heartbreak. 

The UGC-NET June 2025 exam is over, and once again, students are left questioning the system. EdexLive spoke to candidates across disciplines who say the exam has stopped testing real knowledge and now rewards rote memorisation and previous year question patterns.

Subjects like Political Theory, Western Thought, or foundational ideologies are slowly vanishing from the paper. What’s being tested today barely scratches the surface of what it means to be a scholar.

Even top-performing students from master’s programmes: gold medalists, critical thinkers are being filtered out. Why? Because they didn’t cram enough dates, names, or chronology. Because they chose understanding over memorisation.

After last year’s chaos, cancellation, leaks, and credibility issues one might have hoped for reform. But instead, the focus seems to have shifted even further toward mechanical, memory-based testing.

In this episode of Straight Up, we break down the collective frustration, the fading value of deep academic study, and what this means for India’s research future.

Are we building scholars or scanners?

Tell us what you think about this upcoming cultural crisis in the comments

Read the report to delve deeper into the debate: https://www.edexlive.com/news/2025/Jun/27/ugc-net-turns-academic-dreams-into-memorisation-nightmares

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