Two students who came to the city from Bihar to take the Bengal joint entrance examination reached the test centre at Jadavpur University on Saturday morning, little realising that they were supposed to go to the university’s Salt Lake campus, 14km away.

Manish Kumar, 19, who came from Patna, and Irfan Ansari, 18, from Dehri-on-Sone in Rohtas, Bihar, had seen Jadavpur University on their admit cards and assumed they had to go to Jadavpur.

Upon realising, the two were seen panicking at the bus stop opposite Jadavpur police station and sergeant Niloy Halder of Jadavpur traffic guard approached them offering help. “They had limited time and money. We arranged for one of our office staff to accompany them on a motorcycle. They managed to reach the Salt Lake campus on time,” said a traffic department officer.

Rajib Bandopadhayay, the centre in-charge of the university’s Salt Lake campus, said all 279 candidates reached the venue before the start of exam at 11am.

But for such minor glitches, the exam went off smoothly and around 74,000 examinees wrote the pen-and-paper test at 274 centres in Bengal.

The first public examination amid the pandemic saw many candidates using private transport and app cabs to reach the centres because of the Covid-induced travel restrictions, said a higher education department official.

At JU’s main campus centre, candidates were allowed to enter from 9.20am, said Anupam Debsarkar, a centre in-charge. “The JEE board instructed us to open the centre from 9.30am. But we opened 10 minutes earlier as candidates were required to undergo thermal scanning while maintaining the physical distance.”

Registrar Snehamanju Basu and other officials stood guard to check that examinees wore masks and carried hand sanitisers.

The board instructed those managing the centres to provide examinees the protective gear in case they did not have them.

“We accommodated 28 examinees in each room, maintaining a distance of 5 metres between two candidates. Each bench had only one candidate,” said Basu.

A JEE board official said they had allocated centres closest to the applicants’ homes to curtail the use of public transport. “Even if they had to use private transport, they did not have to travel much,” said the official.

The results will be published by August 14.

A three-phased centralised online counselling will be held by September 15.