E-Paper
JEE Advanced may shift to adaptive testing by 2030 to reduce coaching dependence
The IITs are looking to roll out the new assessment system, in which question difficulty would adapt to a candidate’s performance
Prefer HTon Google
The idea of changing the assessment pattern of the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced has moved from the proposal stage to a pilot involving around 4,000 students across multiple Indian Institute of Technology (IITs), with the institutions now collecting data to assess whether adaptive testing can better measure students’ abilities and reduce the dependency on coaching.
The IITs are looking to roll out the new assessment system, in which question difficulty would adapt to a candidate’s performance, as early as 2030, subject to at least three years of research and validation, with a formal announcement required by early 2027.
The proposal was first formally discussed at the 55th IIT Council meeting on August 25, 2025, after a gap of two years. IIT Kanpur director Prof Manindra Agrawal raised concerns over the existing examination structure, including the growing influence of the coaching industry and the emotional and financial stress it places on students and families.
Also Read:IIT Madras’ WSAI and CODE to organise workshop on systems biology & metabolic engineering
The latest pilot, conducted recently, involved about 4,000 first-year students across multiple IITs. “The aim of the current exercise is data collection and also correlation with the ability of students. The data generated would help build the adaptive mechanism,” Agrawal told HT.
The data on students’ responses and performance has been collected and is now being processed. Each IIT appointed a nodal officer to oversee the exercise.
Under the proposed adaptive system, students would initially be given questions of different types and their performance would be used to assign difficulty levels as they progress through the test.
IIT Kanpur is also examining automated generation of questions across difficulty levels, potentially using AI agents, to create a large database and ensure students receive fresh questions, reducing the scope for copying and cheating.
Agrawal proposed adaptive testing of quantitative and reasoning skills, under which questions would be dynamically generated and their difficulty adjusted based on a candidate’s performance. The objective is to develop an examination that better captures critical thinking and reasoning abilities while reducing dependence on coaching and rote preparation.
Also Read:NTA overhaul: Centre appoints IRS officer as director, another as joint secretary
The IIT Council minutes, released in January 2026, recommended that the Joint Admission Board (JAB) and IIT Kanpur examine the proposal’s feasibility, operational requirements and potential to reduce coaching dependence and examination vulnerabilities.
The council also proposed developing a question-generation tool capable of producing questions of varying difficulty levels. As an initial experiment, it suggested an optional adaptive test around two months before JEE Advanced to allow IITs to collect performance data and compare it with students’ actual JEE Advanced results. A white paper was also envisaged to lay out a phased roadmap for the transition.
The institute will compare students’ adaptive-test scores with their JEE Advanced scores and performance in different IITs as part of a multimodal analysis. Agrawal said research in the US and other countries has found a high correlation between aptitude tests and innate intelligence, and IIT Kanpur is “now working to validate such findings in the Indian context.”
JEE is conducted in two stages. JEE Main, conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), is used for admission to NITs, IIITs and other centrally funded technical institutions and serves as the qualifying examination for JEE Advanced. The latter is conducted by an IIT on a rotational basis and its rank is used for admission to undergraduate programmes at the 23 IITs.
Agrawal said the research would take a minimum of three years and that IITs were looking to launch the new system as early as 2030.
“If we want to do it by 2030, we have to announce it by early 2027,” he said, adding that the institutions are still collecting and validating data. The final decision will be taken collectively by IIT directors and the Union education ministry after evaluating the evidence.
