The New York State Board of Regents has mandated that all student answer sheets be scanned, recorded and maintained electronically. The EASE™ Regents Scanning Solution was successfully utilized in a pilot program in several school districts in Eastern Suffolk and Nassau counties and the Mid Hudson region for the January 2011 Regents.
The Regents Scanning Solution (RSS) demonstrated several advantages over hand scoring or the use of other currently available software solutions. With OSC’s RSS, manual labor and the high percentage of human errors associated with hand scoring is eliminated. The consensus among participants in the program was that accuracy increased, human error was virtually eliminated, and the time required to complete the process decreased significantly.
Jeffrey Schneider, EVP Research & Development at OSC, explains, “With the Regents Scanning Solution, quality control of the scoring process is built in. All marks are automatically detected and any questions with multiple answers are ferreted out and evaluated by two operators.
Participants were particularly impressed with the time saved utilizing RSS to facilitate scoring. OSC fulfilled its guaranteed turn-around time of one hour from the receipt of the last image scanned to the delivery of the raw data file, so the time and staff required to complete scoring were significantly reduced.
The districts who participated in the pilot tests were equally impressed with the cost-effectiveness of the system. With the RSS, there is no need to purchase costly, cumbersome software programs designed to read and decipher students’ marks. Personnel do not have to be trained to learn and implement those programs.
Instead, as Schneider explains, ”OSC processes the images scanned by the school districts, captures the intended marks, reviews and verifies multiple responses and disseminates the raw data to be tabulated and scored.”
“Based on the success of the pilot program, several RICs and BOCES throughout New York State have already expressed interest in the program for the June 2011 Regents," said John Harrison, EVP Sales & Marketing at OSC."We are confident that our RSS will help schools comply with the State mandates for Regent scanning.”
