[8][9] High school students from across India typically prepare for several years to take this exam, and most of them attending coaching institutes.

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".

[citation needed] 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.

[citation needed] 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.

[15] 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 (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Persons With Disabilities (PwD) categories needed a minimum score of 55%.

[citation needed] 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".

The two-tier reform suggested in 2005 may become a reality as the Indian government has announced plans for a single entrance exam for all engineering colleges from 2018, with students aspiring for the IITs having to pass the nationwide standardized engineering entrance exam JEE-Main with high marks, and then take the JEE-Advanced to qualify for the IITs.

JEE (Advanced) is conducted in two papers of three hours each – Paper-1 and Paper-2 (both compulsory) consist of questions from three major subjects: physics, chemistry and mathematics.

General physics, classical Newtonian mechanics, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, acoustics (sound and oscillation), electromagnetism, electrostatics, electrodynamics or, electromagnetism (both electricity and magnetism) and electromagnetic waves, modern physics (radioactivity, nuclear physics, elementary quantum mechanics), optics (both geometrical optics and wave optics) General studies of substance (moles, molarity, redox reactions, etc), atomic structure (with concerned topics of quantum mechanics), states of matter, chemical thermodynamics and chemical kinetics, equilibrium chemistry (both chemical equilibrium and ionic equilibrium), electrochemistry, colligative properties, titrations (including acid–base and redox), surface science and nuclear chemistry.

Periodic properties, bonding in chemicals (including the theories of bonding i.e. valence bond theory, VSEPR theory and molecular orbital theory), coordination compounds and complexes, metallurgy, qualitative inorganic salt analysis, hydrogen, detailed studies of reactions, physical and chemical properties, along with their certain compounds of alkali metals, alkaline earth metals, boron family, carbon family, nitrogen family, oxygen family, halogens and noble gases, transition elements (including noble metals), actinides, lanthanides, types of reactions and environmental chemistry.

IUPAC nomenclature, general organic chemistry (including hybridization, hydrogen bonding, inductive effects, isomerism, resonance, aromaticity, hyperconjugation, mesomerism, carbocations and carbanions, bond cleavage including heterolysis and homolysis, stereoisomerism including enantiomers and diastereomers), organic reagents, some named reactions, detailed analysis of reaction mechanisms, the compounds and preparation of hydrocarbons, alkyl halides, carbonyl compounds (alcohols, phenols and ethers), aromatic compounds, biomolecules, carbohydrates and polymers, amines, Chemistry in everyday life and practical organic chemistry.

Source:[46] The number of students taking the examination increased substantially each year with 506,484 candidates registered for JEE-Advanced- 2012.

[59] The IIT-JEE is conducted only in English and Hindi; it has been criticized as being harder for students from places where other Indian languages, like Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Oriya, Bengali, Marathi, Assamese, or Gujarati, are more prominent.

[62] The PMK party filed Public Interest Litigation in the Madras High Court to conduct the IIT-JEE entrance exam in Tamil.

[63][64] Shiv Sena urged the MHRD to conduct the IIT-JEE and other national undergraduate entrance exams in regional languages, particularly Marathi in Maharashtra.

The coaching classes create a situation of extreme pressure for the students, gradually affecting their mental health.

[67] Coaching programs are major corporations, listed on the Indian stock market and also attracting billions of dollars of investment from private equity firms.

[69] To mitigate this pressure, initiatives like National Level Common Entrance Examination (NLCEE) provide students with exposure visits to prestigious institutions, helping them make informed decisions and reduce stress.

The Joint Admission Board (JAB) decided to conduct the entire exam online from 2018 onwards, hoping to reduce the chances of paper leak and make logistics and evaluation easier.