Jadavpur University will hold a pen-and-paper admission test on January 17 at select centres across Calcutta, Burdwan, Durgapur and Siliguri for admission to the Masters’ of Computer Application (MCA) programme.

The Bengal JEE board, which holds the admission test on behalf of JU and other institutions offering MCA in July, declined to do so this time because of the Covid pandemic.

JU decided to hold the exam even as the board announced that it would conduct centralised online e-counselling and provisional admission on the basis of marks in qualifying exams (BE/BTech/BSc) for the candidates who had applied for the entrance test.

The students’ union in the engineering faculty had appealed to the university to hold the admission test.

According to a notice issued by the faculty council of engineering and technology, the admission test will be held in four cities — Calcutta, Burdwan, Durgapur and Siliguri - “subject to sufficient number of candidates”.

An official of the university said each aspirant would be asked to mention a city as second preference. “If a centre in a city only has a handful of candidates, then we may request them to shift to a centre in the second preference city. We don’t want to waste resources,” he said.

Admission will be solely based on performance in the admission test. Online application forms will be available on the www.jaduniv.edu.in from Saturday. Applications will have to be submitted by January 12.