Joint Entrance Examination – Advanced
The Joint Entrance Examination – Advanced is an academic competitive examination held annually in India that tests the skills and knowledge of the applicants in physics, chemistry and mathematics as second stage of Joint Entrance Examination. It is the primary assessment for entrance to the IITs and various engineering colleges in India.
It is organised by one of the seven zonal Indian Institutes of Technology : IIT Roorkee, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, and IIT Guwahati, under the guidance of the Joint Admission Board on a round-robin rotation pattern for the qualifying candidates of the Joint Entrance Examination – Main. It used to be the sole prerequisite for admission to the IITs' bachelor's programs before the introduction of UCEED, Online B.S. and Olympiad entries, but seats through these new media are very low.
The JEE-Advanced score is also used as a possible basis for admission by Indian applicants to non-Indian universities such as the University of Cambridge and the National University of Singapore. High school students from across India typically prepare for several years to take this exam, and most of them attend coaching institutes.
As of 2026, approx. 1.3 million students appear in JEE Main annually, of which 250,000 qualify for JEE Advanced, and around 40,000 students gain admissions to IITs, NIITs, IIITs, and other technical institutions. All India Rank under 300 is often required to qualify for the most coveted Computer Science Engineering programs at one of the top IITs.
History
Before the Indian Institutes of Technology, India had a few engineering colleges. These colleges used different ways to admit students. Some used school marks, and others had their own tests. The quality of education and the ways to get into college were not the same across India.The Indian government wanted to make better engineers. The first institute among IITs, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, started in 1951. In its initial years before 1961, students were admitted based on their academic results, followed by an interview in several locations across the country. From 1955 to 1960, 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 was first conducted in 1961 as Common Entrance Exam, coinciding with the 1961 IIT Act. This was the start of a big change in how students got into IITs. The JEE had papers in Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics. It also had a paper in English. Students from all over India took the same test.
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.
In 2002, an additional exam called the AIEEE was introduced, and it was used for admissions to many institutions of national importance other than the IITs.
In 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. Two possible solutions were proposed - either a convergence between the screening test and the All India Engineering Entrance Examination, or a two-tier examination. Whereas ranks from the first tier can be used to gain admission to the NITs 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. The revised examination consisted of a single objective test, replacing and abolishing the earlier two-test system with screener. In the revised examination, to be eligible for taking it, 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 Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Persons With Disabilities categories needed a minimum score of 55%.
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.
In 2008, the Indian Institutes of Technology began offering their admission tests in Dubai. Annually, the number of candidates for the examination in Dubai varies between 200 and 220.
In 2013, the AIEEE was renamed JEE-Main, and IIT-JEE was renamed JEE-Advanced; the JEE-Main had become the screening exam for JEE-Advanced.
In 2018, the JEE-Advanced exam started being conducted online.
Qualifying percentage (As of JEE Advanced 2024)
Minimum percentage of aggregate/subject marks may be lowered subsequently considering the toughness of the paper and the need of students.| Category | Minimum percentage of marks in each subject | Minimum percentage of aggregate marks |
| Common rank list | 4.17 | 15.28 |
| OBC-NCL/GEN-EWS | 4.17 | 13.89 |
| ST/SC/PWD | 2.50 | 7.78 |
| Preparatory course for SC/ST/PWD | 0.83 | 3.89 |
Number of applicants by year
Organizing institute
The JEE – Advanced exam is conducted by the seven zonal Indian Institutes of Technology : IIT Roorkee, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras and IIT Guwahati on a rotating basis. This list shows the organizers of the exam in recent years.| Year | Organizer | Date |
| 2000 | IIT Delhi | |
| 2001 | IIT Kharagpur | |
| 2002 | IIT Bombay | |
| 2003 | IIT Madras | |
| 2004 | IIT Kanpur | |
| 2005 | IIT Delhi | |
| 2006 | IIT Kharagpur | |
| 2007 | IIT Bombay | |
| 2008 | IIT Roorkee | |
| 2009 | IIT Guwahati | |
| 2010 | IIT Madras | |
| 2011 | IIT Kanpur | |
| 2012 | IIT Delhi | |
| 2013 | IIT Delhi | June 2, 2013 |
| 2014 | IIT Kharagpur | May 25, 2014 |
| 2015 | IIT Bombay | May 24, 2015 |
| 2016 | IIT Guwahati | May 22, 2016 |
| 2017 | IIT Madras | May 21, 2017 |
| 2018 | IIT Kanpur | May 20, 2018 |
| 2019 | IIT Roorkee | May 27, 2019 |
| 2020 | IIT Delhi | September 27, 2020 |
| 2021 | IIT Kharagpur | October 3, 2021 |
| 2022 | IIT Bombay | August 28, 2022 |
| 2023 | IIT Guwahati | June 4, 2023 |
| 2024 | IIT Madras | May 26, 2024 |
| 2025 | IIT Kanpur | May 18, 2025 |
| 2026 | IIT Roorkee | May 17, 2026 |
Paper pattern
JEE is conducted in two papers of three hours each – Paper-1 and Paper-2 consist of questions from three major subjects: physics, chemistry and mathematics. Unlike most of the other exams, the type, the number of questions being asked in the paper, the total marks and the marking scheme varies from year to year depending upon the organizing institute, with an average of about 32–38 questions asked from each subject across both the papers. For example, the 2021 JEE-Advanced paper had 38 questions from each of the three subjects.Each paper in every subject is usually divided into 4 sections In JEE adv. 2025 in first paper, every subject is divided into 4 sections and in second paper, every subject is divided into 3 sections :
| Section | Problem type | Description |
| 1 | 4 single-correct MCQs |
|
| 2 | 3 question stems with 2 questions per stem | |
| 3 | 6 multi-correct MCQs | |
| 4 | 3 fill-in-the-blank questions | |
| 5 | integer answers type questions | |
| 6 | Numerical answer based questions |