Karlton Brown

Karlton Brown is the Coordinator of Research for the Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Assessment at Lynn University. His office is the clearinghouse for internally externally reported institutional data. His office operates under Office of the President, which ensures transparency so that data is without bias. Information is reported to internal departments and externally to the Department of Education and other government departments for research. Data is sometimes provided to other academic institutions for institutional research. It is critical that they report same figures and maintain the same formulae to obtain consistent results. They even perform data collection for doctoral students or recommend the Remark software to these students. Since 2005, Remark Office OMR and Remark Classic OMR have helped them accomplish their goals.

Before Remark, Karlton and his team were hand coding data using Excel and SPSS, which is costly and error prone. Not only does hand entry lack accuracy, but there is a great deal of reliance on dexterity and having your eyes in the right place. They found Remark and one of our fondest memories is Karlton’s attendance at a Remark Office OMR training class, where his humor brightened everyone’s day. Their major data collection project is course evaluations, which can number in the tens of thousands depending on enrollment. Remark allows them to collect and analyze the course evaluations so that they can quickly get the feedback into instructors’ hands. Outside of course evaluations, Karlton has found a myriad of uses for the software, all depending on the needs of institution at any given time. Students have used Remark for elections, which creates great awareness of Remark Office OMR and its capabilities. At this point, people dream up uses for the software. They particularly like 202 – Detailed Item Analysis and 205 – Analysis Group reports. They like that can create their own metrics based on specific groups. Pre-planning is more in depth now so they can get the most of the reports.

Karlton likes that the Remark software is “flexible and reliable” and that there is not a new learning curve from version to version. He feels it allows him to offer more to constituents by being more creative and therefore better able to address needs more efficiently. The end result is better utilization of resources. Recently Karlton has given talks at tradeshows about his projects that utilize the Remark software. He is our most enthusiastic proponent and we are quite thankful to him for spreading the word about Remark.