‘Student-friendly’ JEE Advanced Live: Update and pass

Update and pass

The Indian Institutes of Technology are discussing major reforms for the IIT entrance exam, Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced, minutes of the IIT Council meeting reveal. IIT Kanpur and the IITs’ Joint Admission Board (JAB) have been tasked with evaluating a proposal to shift to “adaptive testing of quantitative and reasoning skills” in which the exam “dynamically generates questions based on a student's performance”.

Led by education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the IIT Council met in August but the minutes were published on January 5, 2026.

The proposal for the change came from IIT Kanpur’s director, Manindra Agrawal, who raised concerns about the “current structure” of JEE Advanced and about the “prevalence of a huge coaching industry and the significant emotional and financial stress on families”, say the IIT Council minutes minutes. The goal is to make the IIT JEE more “student friendly” and “less stressful”.

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According to the 55th meeting report, Agrawal argued that the IIT JEE exam “needs to better assess critical thinking and reasoning skills and be made even more fool proof to operational issues etc”.

% Cut in Open BTech Branch-Wise Seats at 10 IITs (From 2015-25)

Source: JIC Reports 2015-2025

He proposed shifting to “adaptive testing of quantitative and reasoning skills, which dynamically generates questions based on a student's performance.” “This model further reduces coaching dependency, enhances fairness, and allows flexible, secure testing environments,” the minutes report him as saying.

The IIT Council has discussed redesigning the IIT JEE Advanced before. It considered doing so in 2023 and even then, it was to “minimise the coaching requirements for the students”.

IIT JEE: Mock test, question generation tool, analysis

The IIT council recommends five steps towards this new model.

First, it said an expert committee led by the JAB and IIT Kanpur will “evaluate the adaptive testing proposal and its potential to reduce coaching dependency and exam vulnerabilities”.