If you grade any volume of tests, need to record surveys into a spreadsheet, or have to deal with other types of data entry, you may be a good candidate for an OMR software platform. You can save a tremendous amount of time per form and reduce errors. This blog will discuss OMR software, who should use it, and for whom it may not be worth the investment. For a demo of Remark’s industry-leading platform, please contact us.
OMR software allows users to capture data from fill-in-the-bubble forms such as exams, surveys, and ballots. As it is a ubiquitous technology, almost everyone has filled out an OMR (optical mark recognition) form at some point in their lives. OMR software simplifies the process of collecting data from these forms. It enables any device that can capture an image (scanner, copier, phone camera) to be used to convert the completed forms to data, which can then be easily tabulated and analyzed by the OMR software or another analysis tool.
If you value your time, and have some volume of OMR forms that need to be processed, then OMR software is likely worth it! We say “likely” as it really depends upon the number of forms that need to be entered. Manual transcription of data from these types of forms to a spreadsheet is tedious, slow, and prone to mistakes. On average, it may take a person a few minutes to enter responses from a paper form into a spreadsheet for analysis. The time per form is dependent upon the number of questions on the form. For each question on the form, the data entry person needs to look at the paper form, discern the intended answer, and then enter that answer in the appropriate column in the spreadsheet. With OMR software, the time to do this task is gated on the speed of your scanner. The time to recognize an entire page of questions is typically counted in seconds, or often fractions of seconds. With desktop scanners becoming ever faster and less expensive, there is quickly a point where the investment in OMR software will outweigh the costs of doing manual data entry in both time and expense.
All kinds of organizations use OMR software and can benefit from its use. Educational institutions at most every level can use OMR software for grading tests and assessments. In these organizations, testing is a necessary task in determining the students’ academic progress. Whether it’s K-12 schools (public, private, or parochial), or higher education institutions such as colleges and universities, community colleges, or continuing education and training or tutoring programs, these institutions will benefit from OMR software. Government agencies, healthcare providers, and non-profits find OMR software to be incredibly useful for gathering and collecting data from surveys and other research studies. Corporations large and small use OMR software for surveys, product research, employee training and certification, and various other tasks. Many large manufacturing, mining, oil production, and other similar companies use OMR forms and software to keep track and report on safety monitoring efforts and incidents at job sites. Finally, an OMR reader is often heavily used to process ballots for federal, state, and local elections, and for corporate, union, and other non-profit organization elections. Those are some of the bigger use cases but there are many other conceivable uses for OMR software.
Use of OMR software eliminates the task of manually entering data from forms. Manual data entry can be a huge task depending upon the size of your cohort of respondents. In today’s climate of “doing more with fewer people,” OMR software largely eliminates the time and expense associated with having employees or contractors spending time manually entering data. It is important to note that manual data entry is prone to human error, and often the data has to be manually entered by two or more people in order to double check the accuracy of any one person’s work. This quickly becomes very expensive! OMR software typically also has the ability to do some basic, or in some cases, advanced analysis of the data. Typical OMR software packages can quickly provide summary data, often meeting the needs of the user and eliminating the need to become an expert in the use of spreadsheets, or investing in an advanced statistical package.
Unless there are very few forms to process, or the forms only have one or two questions, OMR software is worth exploring. OMR software comes in different forms and has different price points. Costs may vary from a few dollars to a few thousand dollars for these applications. There are even some free OMR software applications that can be used. In poorly funded schools, teachers often have to purchase a grading application with their own funds. They can use one of the free phone applications for small numbers of student tests. Using a cell phone app however can be error prone and it may take more time than doing manual grading. Phone apps typically will send forms to the cloud for processing. The downside here is that sending student personal information to one of these applications may break school policy and the law. If this is the case, then manual grading of tests is the only way to go. In cases where protected personal data is collected from the forms, the desktop OMR products are best, as the data does not leave the organization’s computer systems. Remember that OMR software can typically be used on more than just the initial project. The software is useful for many other tasks over time, so the more it is used, the more economical it becomes.
As pioneers in the OMR software field, Gravic’s Remark Team has been producing and continually updating our industry leading OMR software for well over three decades. Remark Office OMR is our flagship product, which has been used by hundreds of thousands of customers around the world to successfully process billions of OMR forms. For educators who need to grade tests and exams, the Remark Test Grading application is a hosted solution used by many leading schools and universities to simplify the grading task for busy instructors. Gravic’s patented recognition technology can adapt to most any OMR form used for any task. It is fast, accurate, and widely used around the globe and is the industry standard. If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, then we are very flattered! Whether you need a bubble sheet scanner or a large-scale solution for your university, contact the Remark Team to request a personal demo, to get a trial, or to ask any questions.
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