If you are a teacher, professor, trainer, or other education professional, you are aware of the amount of time and energy it takes to grade your students’ exam answer sheets. Here are some options for you to consider that should save you a considerable amount of time and effort.
As every educator knows, a good percentage of free time (like their weekend) is consumed with the task of grading exams and quizzes. When grading by hand, each answer sheet may take several minutes to review and grade. The amount of time your task takes depends upon the number and type of questions on the exam and the number of students who took the exam. Here is a guide on how manual grading typically works: First, an answer key sheet is prepared and filled out with the correct answer to each question. Make sure to do this accurately or all your tests will be graded incorrectly. Now the real grading can begin! For each exam answer sheet, the lucky grader can compare each exam question response to the answer key and mark the ones that are incorrect on the student’s paper, often in red pen. Make sure that you don’t miss any of them! Then, to figure out the grade, the grader counts the incorrect responses and uses math skills to figure out the percentage of correct responses on the test. This may then be translated to a letter grade based upon a pre-defined grade scale. This process is repeated for each student’s test. Finally, once the grades for all the students are completed, the tired teacher can type the grades into their online gradebook. What could possibly go wrong?
For many years, schools have invested in hardware-based OMR readers for grading exam answer sheets. OMR, or optical mark recognition, converts filled in bubbles on an exam answer sheet to data. For instance, a test question having five possible answers (options A, B, C, D, E) is presented on the answer sheet as five individual bubbles, each representing one of the answer options. A student fills in the second bubble to indicate the second option as their answer. The OMR reader sees the filled in bubble and know the student selected “B” as her answer.
Over the years, OMR readers from companies such as Scantron, NCS, and Apperson have been sold to schools for handling this task. These machines typically require the use of specially printed forms and for students to use a soft lead pencil (HB#2) to fill in the forms. The OMR readers are quick enough to grade a stack of forms in minutes. However, there are a few limiting factors with these machines. First, since there may only be one machine in a school, exam sheets are often turned over to a staff member who will process them when convenient. “When convenient” may not be too convenient for the instructor. Feedback for students should be prompt when the assessment is still fresh in their minds. Sometimes it may take a few weeks to get the results back, which mostly negates the value of the data to be gleaned from the exam. Without special software, the OMR readers typically only print a grade on the exam answer sheets, and the instructor still has to manually enter grades into a gradebook. Finally, these devices tend to be expensive, requiring the purchase of special forms and maintenance contracts. While OMR readers have been used to grade billions of answer sheets over the years, they are typically used for large scale exams and are not always a great solution for a busy instructor needing to quickly grade an exam for a single class.
The first OMR software product, Remark Office OMR, was released in 1991 by Principia Products and there have been several other products released over the years. OMR software is a very effective tool for grading exam answer sheets. There are two types of software available, those that use phone cameras to grade answer sheets, and those that use image scanners for the scanning.
Image scanners are the solution
Scanning answer sheets with an image scanner is the best of both worlds. Most schools have a fleet of copiers that include built-in scanners. Instructors can quickly scan a batch of test forms into a PDF file that can be processed with OMR scanner software products. Even simpler, there are many low-cost desktop image scanners with document feeders available on the market for a few hundred dollars from companies such as Xerox, Ricoh, Canon, and others.
These scanners typically scan 25 to 50 or more pages per minute, meaning your tests will be processed in a few minutes. OMR software such as Remark Office OMR or Remark Test Grading automatically scans and grades the exam answer sheets and transfers the grades directly into many gradebook products. Image scanning is a low-cost alternative to a dedicated OMR reader. A scanner with OMR software has added benefits, such as the ability for teachers to create and print their own customized answer sheets. The scanners can be used for many other tasks, so they are not limited to just scanning answer sheets.
Almost everyone now has access to a phone camera. There are several online hosted applications that will allow a grader to take a picture of a student exam, and the image ill is processed and graded by the application. For an individual teacher with a smaller class size, this is a good way to save a bit of time in the grading process. However, the requirement to take individual photos of each exam sheet and then upload them to an online service still takes some time and coordination. The key is to make sure the photos are of sufficient quality or you will find yourself retaking pictures. In addition, most phone apps will allow you to print exam forms with limited ability to customize the forms. Depending on your school district, student data and privacy may also be a concern. Sending protected data to a potentially unvetted app opens many holes. Still, if you are a K-12 teacher and you need to grade 20 student tests, the phone apps are worth investigating. It is quicker than manually grading and some apps will even enter the grades into your gradebook for you.
Gravic’s Remark Office OMR and Remark Test Grading products are heavily used in higher education, public and private K-12 schools, and for many corporate training assessments. Remark Office OMR is a Windows application that runs on any Windows PC and can be used to process exam answer sheets. It is very flexible and also works for many other types of forms such as surveys, evaluations, and more. Remark Test Grading is a hosted application that is easy to use and very powerful. It is designed for educational purposes, specifically for grading exams. It integrates with many popular gradebooks and learning management systems that are used heavily in education. You can find more information about these applications at remarksoftware.com.
Save yourself time and aggravation. Automate your grading tasks!
Grading student exam answer sheets can be a painful process and is a sad reality of every educator’s life. OMR software is here to help! Based upon your needs there are products that fit your or your school’s budget and ease the time and pain of manually grading exams.
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