The government wants the Indian Institutes of Technology to bring down the difficulty levels of the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE)-Advanced so that seats don’t go vacant, unlike this year when the cut-off had to be reduced after it appeared that about 1,000 seats may not get filled up.“We would like to ask IIT Council and IITs to examine the modalities and the test design of JEE-Advanced exam keeping in view the poor outcome this year. We feel this (test design) was far beyond the capability of students and this issue needs to be addressed,” R Subrahmanyam, secretary (higher education), in the Ministry of Human Resource Development told ET.The ministry is of the view that the difficulty level of JEEAdvanced may be too high, as it was in JEE 2018 . The issue will be taken up as a key agenda item at the next meeting of the IIT Council, which is chaired by the HRD minister. JEE-Advanced 2018, organised by IIT-Kanpur, saw a sharp dip in the number of qualifying students with 18,138 candidates declared eligible for admission to 11,279 IIT seats.The IIT system itself assessed at least 1,000 seats could go vacant this year with such a short merit list . This was expected to hit certain categories such as women and STs. The IIT Joint Admission Board (JAB) had met on June 12 to take stock. Despite the possibility of seats going vacant, the board was reluctant to bring down cut-off and deferred any decision, pending detailed data analysis.But the HRD ministry was quick to respond through a letter to the JAB chairman dated June 13. In this letter, the ministry underlined “the policy of the Government of India that all the reservation category seats in all disciplines are filled and no vacant seat is left after counselling for admission in IITs”.The communication further asked the JAB chairman “to ensure” that a list of candidates twice the number of seats in each discipline and category be released, strictly as per merit, prior to counselling.This prompted a second JAB meeting the same day that led to the decision to bring down the cut-off by 10%, which would add 13,000 candidates to the merit list. This is not the first time questions have been raised about the nature of the JEE and the need for reform.The intent then was to assess ‘raw intelligence’ and disincentivise coaching centres. A single-exam format was proposed under the National Democratic Alliance government to ease the pressure on students, but it could not take off.