Joint Entrance Examination – Advanced

The first institute of IIT, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, started in 1951. In its initial years (1951-1954), students were admitted based on their academic results, followed by an interview in several locations across the country. From 1955–1959, admissions for the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur were conducted via a national examination. Academic disciplines were allotted to the students via interviews and counselling sessions held at Kharagpur.

The IIT-JEE, initially called the Common Entrance Exam (CEE), was first conducted in 1961, coinciding with the 1961 IIT Act.[5]

In 1978, the English paper was not considered when ranking participants' performance in the examination. In 1998, the English test was discontinued.

In 1997, the IIT-JEE was conducted twice after the question paper was leaked in some locations.

Between 2000 and 2005, an additional screening test was used alongside the main examination, intended to reduce pressure on the main examination by allowing only about 20,000 top candidates to appear for the examination, out of more than 450,000 applicants.

From 2002, an additional exam called the AIEEE was introduced, and it was used for admissions to institutions other than the IIT. In 2012, the AIEEE was changed to JEE (Main), and IIT-JEE was renamed JEE (Advanced); the JEE (Main) had become the screening exam for JEE (Advanced).

From June 2005, The Hindu newspaper led a campaign for reforming the IIT-JEE to eradicate the "coaching mania" and to improve gender and socio-economic diversity.[6][7][8] Two possible solutions were proposed - either a convergence between the screening test and the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE), or a two-tier examination. Whereas ranks from the first tier can be used to gain admission to the NIT and other engineering colleges in the country.

In September 2005, the group of directors of all the IITs announced significant revisions to the examination. These were implemented from 2006 onward.[9] The revised examination consisted of a single objective test, replacing the earlier two-test system. In the revised examination, to be eligible for the main examination, candidates in the general category had to obtain at least 60% aggregate marks in the 12th-grade examinations organized by various educational boards of India, while candidates belonging to Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), and Persons With Disabilities (PwD) categories needed a minimum score of 55%.

From 2006, the screening exam was abolished with the introduction of a single-stage multiple-choice exam that started in 2006. In 2008, the director and the dean of IIT Madras proposed further revisions to the examination, arguing that the coaching institutes were "enabling many among the less-than-best students to crack the test and keeping girls from qualifying". They expressed concern that the present system did not allow for applicants' 12 years of schooling to have a bearing on admissions into IIT.[10]

In 2008, the Indian Institutes of Technology began offering their admission tests in Dubai.[11] Annually, the number of candidates for the examination in Dubai varies between 200 and 220.[12]

The two-tier reform suggested in 2005 may become a reality as the Indian government has announced plans for a single entrance exam for all engineering colleges from 2018, with students aspiring for the IITs having to pass the nationwide standard entrance test (JEE-Main) with high marks and then take the JEE-Advanced to qualify for the IITs.[13] In 2018, the JEE (Advanced) exam started being conducted online.

The eligibility criteria for taking the JEE (Advanced) exam are:[14]

• Candidates should rank among the top candidates in Paper-1 of JEE (Main), broken down per category. For example, for JEE (Advanced) 2019, the top 250,000 were eligible, but only 46.5% of those were open for all, the rest being reserved for special categories.
• Candidates should be less than 25 years of age, with five-year relaxation for SC, ST, and PwD candidates.
• Candidates can attempt examination at most two times in two consecutive years.
• Candidates should have qualified the Class XII Board Examination (or equivalent) in the previous year.
• Candidates should not have accepted admission in any of the IIT earlier.

In addition, candidates are required to either be within the category-wise top 20th percentile of successful candidates in the Class XII Board Examination or secure a 75% mark (65% for SC, ST and PwD).[15]

This list shows the organizers of the JEE (Advanced) in recent years.

The number of students taking the examination increased substantially each year with over 485,000 candidates registering for JEE (Advanced) 2011 (an increase of 30,000 students (6.5%) from 2010[17]).

In 2011, additional courses were introduced in the IITs. IIT Tirupati and IIT Palakkad were started in 2015 and four more institutes (IIT Bhilai, IIT Dharwad, IIT Goa, and IIT Jammu) opened in 2016. In 2018, to ensure minimum female enrollment of 14%, the IIT introduced "female only" and "gender-neutral" seats based on 2017 enrollment statistics, and "super-numerary" were created per-institute and per-course to reach the 14% target. With this and slight overall seat increases, the total seat availability crossed twelve thousand, including 801 "super-numerary female-only" seats. For 2019, with the partial rollout of the 10% EWS quota (without a reduction in non-reserved seats) and the increase of the female enrollment target to 17%, the total seats available went up to over 13,500, with over 1200 "super-numerary female-only" seats.

In 2012, Super 30 founder and mathematician Anand Kumar criticised the New Admission Norms, saying that the decision of the IITs' council to give a chance to students in the top 20% from various boards in the class 12 examinations was "a decision in haste". "This is one decision that will go against the poor, who don't have the opportunity to study in elite schools," he added.[22]

The JEE is conducted only in English and Hindi; it has been criticized as being harder for students where regional languages, like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Urdu, Oriya, Bengali, Marathi, Assamese or Gujarati, are more prominent. In September 2011, the Gujarat High Court acted on a Public Interest Litigation by the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, demanding the examinations be conducted in Gujarati also.[23] A second petition was made that October by Navsari's Sayaji Vaibhav Sarvajanik Pustakalaya Trust.[24] Another petition was made at the Madras High Court for conducting the exam in Tamil. In the petition, it was claimed that not conducting the exam in the regional languages violates article 14 of the Constitution of India. PMK, a political party in Tamil Nadu, held a demonstration at Chennai for conducting the IIT-JEE and other national entrance exams in regional languages also, particularly Tamil in Tamil Nadu.[25]

The Pattali Makkal Katchi party filed Public Interest Litigation in the Madras High Court to conduct the IIT JEE entrance exam in Tamil. They claimed that every year 763,000 students were completing grade 12 in Tamil Nadu, 75% of them from Tamil Medium. They had to take the entrance exam in English or Hindi, neither of which was their medium of instruction or their mother tongue, and so were denied their fundamental right to take the entrance exam in a language familiar to them.[26][27] Shiv Sena urged the MHRD to conduct the IITJEE and other national undergraduate entrance exams in regional languages, particularly Marathi language in Maharashtra.[28] In 2017, the supreme court ordered JAB to put a bar on the ongoing counseling process. There were three questions comprising a total of 11 marks that were unclear.

There were several changes made to the exam in 2018. The Joint Admission Board (JAB) decided to conduct the entire exam online from 2018, hoping to reduce the chances of paper leak and make logistics and evaluation easier. It said that the online exam would neutralize the problem of misprinting.[29]

Preparation for the Joint Entrance Exam begins typically two years before students take the test. 90% of students who passed this exam attended coaching institutes, which had created a ₹232.61 billion industry with annual tuition of up to ₹1,17,338.[30] These academies included tests multiple times a week, up to 200 students per class, and long hours, in addition to regular high school work. There were hundreds of academies across the country, and the most famous—in Kota, Rajasthan—attracted approximately 125,000 students each year.[31] Coaching programs are major corporations, listed on the Indian stock market and also attracting tens of millions of rupees of investment from private equity firms.[32] The high-pressure environments at these coaching institutes have been blamed for a significant number of suicides.[33][34]

The HRD minister of India, Ramesh Pokhriyal, has confirmed the 2020 dates for the JEE Mains and NEET. The JEE Main exam will be conducted from 18 to 23 July 2020. The JEE Advanced paper will be held in August.(This has now been subjected to further Postponement, as the COVID 19 crisis is still going on) The NEET will be held on 26th July 2020. Pending CBSE board exams have been canceled as per the official statement for 2020.[35]

• Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering
• Indian Science Engineering Eligibility Test
• Joint Management Entrance Test
• Joint Entrance Examination – Main