David Hawkins is the counseling director of public policy and research for a large educational consulting association. He helps conduct an annual Counseling Trends Survey on a group of 10,000 high schools. This project once took months to complete, but with the help of Remark Office OMR and Remark Web Survey, it has been streamlined.
The NACAC is an association consisting of over 10,000 schools in the U.S. and overseas. David says, “The public policy and research department is responsible for conducting research on the transition from secondary to postsecondary education, on professional trends, and on issues affecting college admission counseling professionals.” His department conducts an annual Counseling Trends Survey, which is sent out to 10,000 high schools. The information is then sent back and manually entered into their data analysis program SPSS. This process originally took months to complete.
David was searching for an alternative when he found out about Remark Office OMR. David said, “The cost and features were the two primary reasons we purchased Remark. Remark fit our needs better than other products.”
David now uses both our Remark Office OMR® and Remark Web Survey® products. Each spring he mails out the survey to the 10,000 high schools in the association. He also places the survey online and receives 300-500 responses via the web, which also helps him save time. He usually collects around 2,000 forms and the time it takes his three staff members to process the data has been cut down exponentially. The data is then easily exported to his analysis system SPSS. His favorite features of the Remark Products are creating the Web Survey form, ability to scan and export to a database, and the open-ended comment scanning.
When asked about his overall experience with changing to the Remark products he replied, “Our switch to Remark has saved us an enormous amount of staff time and money. We used to spend months on manual data entry, which now takes about a week with the scanning software. We have been able to train new staff on the product in a very short time frame, which allows for multiple users and easy integration into the organization.”
