NEW DELHI: The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Sunday said it has “reviewed” the provisional answer keys for Paper 1 (BE/BTech) for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Main 2026 Session 2 and corrected errors of 19 Chemistry questions from the April 5 (Shift 2) examination, following complaints from candidates and teachers.
The move comes a day after the agency acknowledged concerns raised on social media about “inconsistencies” in provisional chemistry answer keys.
Provisional answer keys were released on Saturday around 9:30 p.m. After that, the students and faculties of different training institutes marked the errors. NTA Director General Abhishek Singh responded to the complaints regarding X and said that the matter will be examined with subject matter experts.
On Sunday morning, the NTA posted on X that the reported “discrepancies” were “under investigation” and expressed its regret for the inconvenience caused. By the afternoon, the agency confirmed that the temporary keys had been reviewed and the necessary corrections had been made.
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According to a senior NTA official, a “technical glitch” led to a mismatch between question IDs and correct option IDs in 19 chemistry questions. “These errors have now been corrected in the updated provisional answer keys. Candidates can access the updated answer keys and ask challenges, if any,” the official said.
Candidates can challenge the provisional answer keys online by paying a non-refundable fee of $$200 per question until 11:50pm on April 13. “If the challenge is found to be correct, the answer key will be reviewed and applied to the answers of all candidates accordingly. The final answer keys, as determined by the experts after evaluating all the challenges, will be binding,” the NTA said in a notification dated April 11.
While the agency has not set a date for the final answer key, officials said it will be released after reviewing all the challenges. As per an earlier notification dated April 8, JEE (Main) Session 2 (Paper I) results 2026 are expected to be declared by April 20.
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NTA conducted JEE (Main) Paper 1 2026 Session 2 between April 2 and 8 in multiple shifts across 567 centers in 306 cities in India and 14 cities abroad. About 11.06 lakh candidates appeared for Paper I, a nationwide entrance test for admission to engineering programs in leading institutions including the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other centrally funded technical institutes.
The first paper (BE/BTech) of JEE Main consists of three sections – Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics – with a total of 90 questions (30 in each topic). Out of these, candidates have to attempt 75 questions (25 for each topic). Each topic includes 20 multiple choice questions (MCQs) and 10 numerical value based questions, of which any five must be attempted. Each correct answer carries four marks, while one mark is deducted for each incorrect answer in MCQs. There is no negative marking for unanswered questions. The total maximum marks for the paper is 300.
