Teachers-Have you used Scantron alternatives?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I taught high school (USA) for twenty-six years. For most of them, I had access to a regular Scantron machine. For a while, I had to use a Chatsworth optical card reader instead. The Chatsworth device marked nothing on the cards- it was attached to a computer which then printed out a huge summary, including each kid’s scores (by assigned code number, not name). There were at least six pages per class. The beauty of the Scantron is that it marks the score on each kid’s card and takes about a tenth of the time to run a class set of tests compared to the Chatsworth device.

Recently, more competitors to Scantron have come on the market. Some claim to work with plain copy paper and some use regular scanners. Do any of the competitors match a Scantron machine in speed and simplicity?

2

Maybe something like this? I think you’re going to see handheld response systems start to edge out optical scanning.

3

We use Grade Master at our school, which is just Scantron by another name. The optical scanner for Data Director is just too freaking slow. The district tried to force us to use it and what they got was open rebellion and guerrilla warfare.

4

My history teacher in high school always used to just make a transparency copy of the exam, fill in the correct bubbles with marker, lay it over the test he’s marking, and count the number of times your answer wasn’t under the marked one. Can’t be much slower than an automatic method XD.