Joint Entrance Examination – Advanced

The Joint Entrance Examination – Advanced (JEE-Advanced) is an academic examination held annually in India that tests the skills and knowledge of the applicants in physics, chemistry and mathematics. It is organised by one of the seven zonal Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs): IIT Roorkee, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, and IIT Guwahati, under the guidance of the Joint Admission Board (JAB) on a round-robin rotation pattern for the qualifying candidates of the Joint Entrance Examination – Main (exempted for foreign nationals and candidates who have secured OCI/PIO cards on or after 04–03–2021). 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.

The JEE-Advanced has been consistently ranked as one of the toughest exams in the world. High school students from across India typically prepare for several years to take this exam, and most of them attend coaching institutes. The combination of its high difficulty level, intense competition, unpredictable paper pattern and low acceptance rate exerts immense pressure on aspirants, making success in this exam a highly sought-after achievement. In a 2018 interview, former IIT Delhi director V. Ramgopal Rao, said the exam is "tricky and difficult" because it is framed to "reject candidates, not to select them". In 2024, out of the 180,200 candidates who took the exam, 48,248 candidates qualified.

Before the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were established, 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 to 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.^{[citation needed]}

The IIT-JEE was first conducted in 1961 as Common Entrance Exam (CEE), 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.^{[citation needed]}

In 1997, IIT-JEE was conducted twice after the question paper was leaked in some locations.^{[citation needed]}