Shreya Roy Chowdhury | February 19, 2026 | 02:26 PM IST | 2 mins read
Proposed IIT JEE format will ‘dynamically generate questions’, cut coaching role. Another change: sports, culture, olympiad admissions now under JoSAA result today

today 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”.
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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”.
Also read JEE Advanced reports show IITs cut hundreds of BTech seats in core engineering; here’s what happened
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) | ||
|---|---|---|
Institute | Branch | % of Open Seat Cuts between 2015-25 |
IIT Roorkee | Metallurgical and Materials engineering | 54.55 |
IIT Delhi | Textile engineering | 48.07 |
IIT Kanpur | Material Science engineering | 40 |
IIT ISM Dhanbad | Mineral Engineering | 39.13 |
IIT ISM Dhanbad | Mining Engineering | 38.30 |
IIT Roorkee | Production and Industrial Engineering | 37.93 |
IIT Delhi | Chemical Engineering | 37.84 |
IIT Roorkee | Chemical Engineering | 34.55 |
IIT Bombay | Chemical Engineering | 34.33 |
IIT BHU | Pharmaceutical Engineering | 32.35 |
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”.
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”.
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A former professor from IIT ISM Dhanbad, who did not want to be named, stated that the demand for core branches like metallurgical and materials or mining engineering has “drastically reduced” across India. today
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