If I remember correctly, the approximate cutoff that year for IIT Kanpur M. Tech CS, in terms of rank was about AIR 350 (for open category). The number of seats (total) were around 50. I received an email from IIT Kanpur on 6th May and the written test/interview were to be held on 23rd and 24th May. I was working in Pune then, and I found it really difficult to get train tickets to Kanpur, that being the vacation season. Somehow I landed up in Kanpur after a 36 hour journey on the morning of 23rd.
After getting accommodation and taking some rest, we proceeded for the written test. The written test started at 9 AM. It was a 3hr objective type test. Toughness of the test was comparable to that of GATE. There was a lot of emphasis on Discrete Maths, Probability, Maths, C and programming etc.
I think interview were the most tough part of the selection process. There were about four professors in a room and they were grilling candidates for 15 to 20 minutes each. The professors had a bias towards Discrete Maths, Probability and TOC. Any guy who mentioned any of these as his favorite subject was bombarded with some really tough questions. So the general strategy was to stay away from mentioning these subjects. The professors were not at all interested in OS, DBMS or networks and they regarded these as "easy" subjects. Finally it was my turn. The first question that I was asked was a Dynamic Programming question. At that time my understanding of DP was very weak and I knew then that my chances here are not that good. After I wasn't able to solve it, they then asked me some questions on Merge Sort etc. I was not answering these questions very confidently and they managed to confuse me pretty badly. The worst part about the interview was that they didn't allow me to do any rough work on my own and asked me to use the whiteboard for rough work. This was very tough to do with four professors staring at me.
When the results were declared after a couple of days and I wasn't selected I wasn't surprised. Later during my M. Tech at IIT Delhi we worked a lot on recursion and DP. I then realised that the IITK interview question was not that tough after all...