IITs will test new JEE Advanced format on first-year BTech students this year: IIT Kanpur director

JEE Advanced: The Indian Institutes of Technology will test a new format of its entrance test, Joint Entrance Examination (JEE ) Advanced, on first-year engineering students in the IITs. “The pilot aptitude test will be first given to new BTech students joining all IITs this year to see how they are able to perform,” said Manindra Agrawal, director, IIT Kanpur.

Agrawal was also the one to propose reforming the admission mechanism for the IITs at the IIT Council meeting last year. He and IIT Kanpur were tasked with planning a shift to “adaptive testing of quantitative and reasoning skills”. Subsequently, IIT Kanpur was preparing for a pilot aptitude test around JEE Advanced 2026. The IIT JEE Advanced results were declared on May 31.

IIT Kanpur is already looking beyond JEE Advanced for admissions to certain programmes. On Thursday, it launched a four-year cybersecurity course for which admissions will be based on JEE Main results and a hackathon. Agrawal expects at least 400 students participate in the hackathon – to be held in the beginning of July – for which candidates will be shortlisted on the basis of their JEE Mains marks and work in cybersecurity.

“We are targeting 400-odd students for the hackathon. Candidates will be evaluated based on the marks through their demonstrated activities in cybersecurity and JEE Mains marks,” he stated.

‘Adaptive’ JEE Advanced

Agrawal said the IITs will check how students are performing on the new format and shift to the adaptive test fully over the next three years.

“We will check the adaptability of the aptitude test over a year or two and we are hoping over the next three years to shift to this sort of aptitude test,” he told Academia360. “Each IIT will conduct this pilot test. This is the first step we have decided to do as of now.”

IIT Kanpur cyber security course

Agrawal said IIT Kanpur had been working on launching the Bachelors in Cybersecurity programme for two years.

“We have been in preparation for the past two years and to launch a course like this requires a huge amount of effort. Lots of approvals within the institute and outside which has taken some time,” stated Agrawal.

While the course will start from 2026-27 onwards, the application portal will be launched by next week, Monday. “First thing is the application portal is to be launched which will be up by Monday. Then we will move towards preparation for the hackathon which will be in the beginning of July.”

IIT Kanpur’s team has already hired Nisarga Adhikary, the 19 year-old who exposed the security weaknesses of the Central Board of Secondary Education’s on-screen marking (CBSE OSM) platform, as an Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) and threat intelligence engineer.

“We need people like him with his kind of expertise in our cybersecurity group at the institute. We will give tasks around cybersecurity and let him do mitigation strategies during cybersecurity issues,” said Agrawal.