Education Ministry Reconstitutes JAB to Ensure Better Conduct of JEE Main, Advanced

The Ministry of Education (MoE) has issued an order to redesign the board structure and administrative setup of the JEE Apex Board (JAB), which oversees the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE). The entrance exam is meant for students seeking admission to undergraduate engineering programmes in IITs, NITs, and other centrally funded technical institutions and so on.

The National Testing Agency (NTA) will take care of all the technical aspects such as software support and back-end tasks for both pre and post-examination activities, including the online application form submission. The official notice also mentions that NTA may collaborate with NIC/C-DAC if needed.

Professor SK Jain, who serves as the Vice-Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University (BHU), has been selected as the chairperson of the Joint Admission Board (JAB). The JAB will also include directors from various prestigious institutions such as IIT Bombay, IIT Guwahati, IIT Madras, NIT Rourkela, NIT Surathkal, IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT (PPP) Lucknow, IIITM Gwalior, as well as representatives from the state governments of Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab Engineering College, Chairman of CBSE, Director General of NIC, NTA, and C-DAC, along with the Additional Secretary/Joint Secretary (TE) of the Ministry of Education, has been appointed as members of the JAB.

As stated in MoE official notification, “The JAB would have a permanent secretariat which would be provided by the National Testing Agency (NTA). JAB would be assisted by the JEE Interface Group comprising five members drawn from NTA, IITs, and a senior representative of Indian Statistical Institutes (ISI) nominated by the Joint Apex Board.”

This means that the Joint Admission Board (JAB) will now be in charge of creating rules and policies for the JEE (Main) exam, and they will also work with the organisation that manages the JEE (Advanced) exam.

The NTA will assist in organising the JEE (Main) exams nationwide by providing administrative and logistic support. The JAB’s permanent office within the NTA will use the existing infrastructure, a surplus of financial resources accumulated since the creation of the first JAB, and the available manpower being contributed by the present JEE (Main) unit. They may create a few new positions if needed, like the executive director, as approved by the Cabinet/CEE, to meet the specific demands of the task.