NEW DELHI: It was over by 5:15 PM. NTA scrapped the original NEET UG exam seven weeks ago over a leak scandal. On Sunday evening, nearly 23 lakh medical aspirants finally walked out of test centres with the re-exam behind them. Some looked relieved. Some grumbled about Physics. Most just looked glad the wait was over.

NTA conducted the re-test in the usual pen-and-paper format, 2 PM to 5:15 PM. Centres covered 5,440 locations in more than 550 cities, plus a handful abroad, including Riyadh. Outside one centre in Delhi’s Rohini, a group of students compared notes on the OMR sheet. Their parents hadn’t even reached the gate yet. That’s roughly what this exam looks like every year. This year, it just happened twice.

Why there was a re-exam at all

Go back to May 3. NTA held the original NEET UG 2026 that day. Nine days later, it cancelled the exam. Investigators had flagged a “guess paper” circulating out of Sikar, Rajasthan that lined up too closely with the actual questions. Protests followed. So did petitions and a Supreme Court challenge that went nowhere. Thousands of anxious eighteen-year-olds sat in limbo for weeks. They didn’t know if they’d write the exam again or fight in court over results that might never come.

The court eventually refused to intervene. NTA picked June 21 as the new date. That’s the exam that just wrapped up.

The security build-up was, frankly, a lot

This is where things got unusual. Question papers didn’t travel by road this time. They went out on Indian Air Force aircraft and helicopters instead. NTA installed CCTV cameras in more than 95,000 exam rooms. Upward of a lakh cameras fed live monitoring at the state and national level. NTA also kept paper-setters in isolation ahead of the exam. A Delhi High Court order temporarily blocked Telegram in parts of the country. The goal: choke off any paper-leak channel before it could spread. NTA even ran a full mock drill the day before, on June 20, just to stress-test the whole operation.

NTA also tacked on an extra 15 minutes. That pushed the end time to 5:15 PM instead of the usual 5 PM. The extra time made up for minutes lost to frisking and biometric checks at the gate.

Not everything went smoothly

NTA somehow allotted a Nagpur student, Abdullah Mohammad Talib, a test centre in Abu Dhabi. NTA blamed a technical glitch. It scrambled to issue him a revised admit card closer to home before the exam.

Then there was Ajmer. Officials stopped a candidate named Kulsum Bano at her centre’s gate over her burqa and dupatta. She said she’d worn the exact same outfit to the May 3 exam without anyone raising an objection. She and her father had travelled from Beawar for the test. After what she described as a standoff at the gate, officials eventually let her in.

Not every centre saw this kind of friction, though. Officials in Prayagraj told PTI the exam went off without a hitch. All 47 centres in the city ran smoothly.

So… how was the paper?

The most common word floating around outside centres by 5:30 PM: “lengthy.” Specifically about Physics.

Rudra Pratap Singh is attempting NEET for the third time. He found Biology easy and Chemistry moderate. Physics, though, dragged concept-heavy questions that ate up roughly three minutes apiece, he said. He also noticed fewer assertion-reason questions than the cancelled May 3 paper had.

That read on the paper kept coming up at different centres: Physics tough, Chemistry fair, Biology gettable. A few students flagged the occasional fuzzy question. But nobody reported anything wildly out of syllabus. After last time’s controversy, that alone counts as a small win. Coaching faculty doing quick memory-based reviews landed in roughly the same place. Moderate-to-tough overall, with Physics doing most of the damage.

What’s next

NTA expects to release the provisional answer key by June 24. The usual objection window follows after that. Coaching institutes had unofficial, memory-based keys up within hours of students leaving the hall. Plenty of candidates already have a rough score in mind, even before NTA’s official version drops.

NTA expects to publish results and the scorecard by end of July. Counselling for MBBS, BDS, BAMS, BUMS, BSMS and BHMS seats kicks off after that, nationwide. A few experts tracking the exam expect this year’s cutoff to creep higher than usual. Part of that is the paper itself. Part of it is the simple fact that this batch of students has now prepared for, and sat, two high-stakes exams in one year.

For tonight, though, most of that can wait. Ask almost anyone walking out of a centre on Sunday what they felt. The answer wasn’t about cutoffs or counselling. It was relief plain and simple that after a leak, a cancellation, a court fight and weeks of not knowing, the exam had actually, finally happened.