8 ms·

The End of Scantron Tests

48 points by gnicholas 3y ago

haspoken 3y ago
https://archive.ph/rgqfl https://archive.ph/rgqfl
murphyslab 3y ago
> Soon, however, teachers and government officials sought ways to evaluate rapidly increasing numbers of students. In 1900, roughly 10 percent of teens attended high school; by 1940, some 70 percent did. It reminds me of looking at a 1930s census, not long ago, while compiling a family history. Some of the adults on a rural farm were listed as having completed "4th grade". It's rather difficult to imagine a world where that was the norm and to compare how different our world now must be, when nearly everyone has completed high school.
- JasonFruit 3y ago
  I wonder how much the actual average level of education has changed, though the topics may be different. Could those 4th-grade dropouts read and understand a newspaper, calculate how many pounds of barley it takes to plant the south field now that we cleared that new area, and work out a 1-in-10 slope for the new shed roof? I bet most of them could, and that a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs — which may be less easily ascertained.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    > a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs When most people lived on farms (up until the 1950s), there was less need to be good factory workers. But there were more factories offering more employment in America, so the stats say you are correct. https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promoted-by-industrialists-who-wanted-docile-factory-workers https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promote...
  - flangola7 3y ago
    What did they receive for humanities though? School is and should be about you making a better more complete member of society, not just a better cog in the economy.
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    > i bet most of them could, and that a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs — which may be less easily ascertained. Interesting to order it this way because, as the engine of meritocracy, education is supposed to determine life direction, not be reflective of it. Of course this isn't how people actually think of it, but we don't live in a meritocracy either now do we
  - pixl97 3y ago
    And pretty much all those jobs you're talking about are gone or low paying. Farmers aren't calculating how many pounds of barley per acre they need. They are operating computer controlled heavy equipment that does a huge amount of the calculations for them because someone thousands of miles away wrote magicial electric symbols in sand. The world is a vastly more complicated place now.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > operating computer controlled heavy equipment that does a huge amount of the calculations for them They're also measuring soil nutrient and nitrogen content, integrating global price signals into their sourcing and supply chain, and paying attention to the genetic characteristics of their cultivars. I'd wager American farmers, today, are vastly more knowledgeable about their craft, at a fundamental level, than farmers in the 1930s.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Wow. Someone doesn't spend time in rural areas. Where I live it's almost all third generation "family farms", those that are still here after others have left. The farms are bigger but they're still at core family farms and businesses with capital costs in the millions to tens of millions, run and worked by people that farm and almost all whom have other jobs and|or businesses in parallel. One typical neighbour is planting out several hundred acres, has a side supply business with the grain coop to site several five story concrete grain silos, owns and runs four or five local school buses (and employs drivers) with a partnership in a bee hive placement business (for honey but mainly for pollination in the district). Between them they all have a basic grasp of (with different members specialising) building, radio equipment, GPS equipment and data managment, double entry bookkeeping and employee paperwork for a million+ per annum turn over, mechanics for cars, tractors, bob cats, etc, agonomy, animal health, first aid, welding, carpentry, . . . Hmm, while I think of it the same family has the local volunteer fire chief (another part time job) who handles bush fire preparedness in the area, fire breaks etc. There's no reliance on "magical someones" thousands of miles away - those services are used, sure - but they're not counted on to be always available or there when needed - farming would just grind to halt with that level of unquestioning dependance.
  - LarsDu88 3y ago
    Take a look at this entrance exam to Harvard from 1869: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde... Good luck finding high school students today who could get a good score on this test. There's vastly more emphasis on classical knowledge: Greek, Latin, ancient history, mathematical proofs...
    - wbl 3y ago
      If Greek or Latin we're still requirements for Harvard high school students would become fluent.
      - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
        They sure would enjoy the salutatory speeches delivered at commencement: https://youtu.be/LYewkFKPPhs?si=egbRqSO2lMVxIMzz https://youtu.be/LYewkFKPPhs?si=egbRqSO2lMVxIMzz
    - bhaney 3y ago
      I can't even figure out what some of these are asking. Question 5 of the History and Geography section is just "Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander." Am I supposed to write about what they have in common? Who they each were? When and where they ruled? Other questions seem to include some form of instruction while being equally short ("Compare Athens with Sparta") but that one and a couple others are just a topic with seemingly no direction at all.
      - LarsDu88 3y ago
        Heh, obvious a cultured man of knowledge (or anyone who watched the movie 300 and read wikipedia) would know that these are major leaders of Sparta Grant, Sherman, Meade Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle It's to filter the cultured elite from the unread plebes.
    - plorkyeran 3y ago
      I would expect most Harvard-bound high school seniors to be able to breeze through the math section. Geometry was a ninth grade subject for me so I probably would have forgotten some bits if I took this unprepared as a senior, but it wouldn't have taken much studying ro refresh on that. There may be some trick question I'm not noticing, but the Latin section seems extremely simple. Ancient Greek has certainly vanished from HS curriculums, but if Harvard was testing on it two years of Latin and two years of Greek would suffice to pass those sections. I think overall a Harvard-bound student today would do better on this test than a Harvard student from 1869 would do on the SAT, but I'm not sure if that even means anything.
- cudgy 3y ago
  “It's rather difficult to imagine a world where that was the norm and to compare how different our world now must be, when nearly everyone has completed high school.” Why? Are you sure that there was a significant difference between 4th grade in the 1930’s and 12th grade in modern days? Many students graduate high school barely able to read and write.
  - stouset 3y ago
    Surely you’re joking that you don’t think there’s much of a practical difference between an era where 90% of the population had less than eight years of schooling, and one where the overwhelming majority have twelve to sixteen. I mean, you can literally just look up the statistics on literacy rates.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - lmm 3y ago
      > I mean, you can literally just look up the statistics on literacy rates. From what I remember they're shockingly low for a world where everyone finishes high school. IIRC only about 2/3 have even basic functional literacy?
      - stouset 3y ago
        You remember incorrectly. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_State...
    - cudgy 3y ago
      Just because someone went to school longer, doesn’t mean that they learned more or learned skills they need to function in society. Also, schools today are full of distractions, class changes, unnecessary technology, and much larger class sizes than was present in the 1930’s. It's just not the same environment and simply comparing years of attendance is a naive approach.
irtefa 3y ago
I'm nostalgic for filling in those bubble sheets, even when I hated the tests themselves! They were a huge part of school culture.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  In HS I bought a mechanical pencil with .9mm lead. I could bubble in the circles with just over one rotation, and the rectangles with a single swipe. It was the best.
  - nvy 3y ago
    Was it a Sumogrip, by chance? I had one of those too and it was awesome. I used it for everything and eventually lost it in undergrad.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      Nope, but it did have a huge jelly grip like that. It was a super heavy metal pencil, which gave it a feeling of gravitas.
bl4kers 3y ago
> The SAT will go fully digital next year; the ACT, AP exams, and numerous state tests have already done so or will follow. Future headline: teen hacker caught with stolen tests Also might be a good attack vector for nation states. Could get assets into prestigious schools or publish anonymously online to cast doubt on the entire system I've looked at the CollegeBoard's engineering job listings before and they were far below market rates. Wonder if they're adequately investing in their system's security
- paulpauper 3y ago
  that's why credit score/agency and other finance sector companies have so many data leaks. not paying top dollar for top talent and just not a high priority.
- onetimeusename 3y ago
  There is a history of tests being leaked in Korea and China. Here is an example https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-sat-one/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-... I followed the stories closely and what's weird is how little the College Board did about it. A number of times, whistleblowers would inform them about a test leak and even show them copies of it and they would do nothing about it. I think you're on to something as far as attempting to hack the SAT and the College Board just not having an adequate response.
  - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
    Students managing to manipulate electronic school records has been an issue for as long as they've existed. There was even a well-known case as far back as 1986, which was caught on film [1] at the time and caused quite a stir. [1] https://youtu.be/Hh_vLKlz2Mc https://youtu.be/Hh_vLKlz2Mc
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > I've looked at the CollegeBoard's engineering job listings before and they were far below market rates. I assume you can make that up by leaking the tests.
callalex 3y ago
We are still forcing students to use the same shitty Texas Instruments calculators with horrible screens, unacceptably convoluted interfaces, and criminally slow performance and power consumption due to these same standards bodies. Technology has been better than that for more than 20 years now. We’ve gotten to the point where current students can use the calculator their grandparent bought as a child. How will moving the SAT from a bubble sheet to a laptop change any of the real factors that contribute to this problem?
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I've never thought about the power consumption of TI calculators. I had an 85 and I recall changing the batteries occasionally, but not very often. I also didn't find the performance speed to be a hindrance during HS, including on the SATs. What did you use your calculator for that it was noticeably too slow for? How often did you have to replace batteries? I get that there are newer technologies out there, and perhaps it would be a genius startup idea to make a device that's just like a TI, but using modern chips.
  - callalex 3y ago
    With current technology, 4 AA batteries should be able to power a calculator for an entire educational career from 6th to 12th grade, maybe more. Edit: in terms of performance, the buttons and LCD are very unresponsive, you can type faster than they display. When making any kinds of graphs with more than 2 functions, the drawing happens in the order of 5-10 seconds, modern hardware could do that in micro-to-milliseconds and get the CPU back to sleep to save battery. Anything involving regressions of inputted tables can take 10s of seconds, which again feels clunky and eats battery.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      No doubt. But is it a big deal to have to swap batteries once every couple years? I think the bigger waste is that these things still cost so much. I cannot believe that the TI-85 I used over 20 years ago is $70 on Amazon.
paulpauper 3y ago
"That model was more holistic than a multiple-choice test, but also prone to subjectivity and bias—and only possible, in part, because far fewer children received a formal education." "If the epoch of multiple-choice tests is truly ending, the assessments won’t necessarily be missed. Not only is the format inherently reductive—bubble-in question-and-answer forms have also been prone to bias." So all formats are biased.
- tivert 3y ago
  > So all formats are biased. Bias isn't a binary quality, so that's an oversimplification.
paulpauper 3y ago
Misleading title. Scantron tests have not ended. it's about proposed alternatives.
gnicholas 3y ago
The worst thing about Scantron tests was when you skipped a problem and planned to come back later, but then forgot to leave it blank on the answer sheet. Then all of your answers were off by one, and you had to go back and erase/refill. Some teachers would let you finish with the error intact, and then spend extra time (without the questions, just the answer sheet) shifting your answers down. But if it was a standardized test, no such luck!
F00Fbug 3y ago
I remember working on a project to put scantron machines in every public school in DC back in the 80s. We built the interface from the scantron machine to the DECmate II (a micro-PDP-8, if I remember correctly); async io in assembler... I learned a lot on that part of the project. Then we wrote the scanning software to allow lots of teachers to scan their tests in at the end of the day. Next we built a network over dial-up phone lines to allow the DECmates to upload their daily scans to a VAX (using Kermit, I think). Finally we built the tools to load all of the daily scans into a database and do all kinds of analysis and reporting. All pre-internet -- good times! I remember learning a lot about the scantron forms and realized that if you made a black box at a certain place, that form would be interpreted as the answer key and would screw up a whole pile of scanning!
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > if you made a black box at a certain place, that form would be interpreted as the answer key and would screw up a whole pile of scanning Out of curiosity, where?
  - F00Fbug 3y ago
    In the left margin, about 2/3 of the way down... between a couple of alignment marks. But that was 35 years ago... I could be wrong. I always felt like I held an immense power with that knowledge, but never used it!!!
    - Nilocshot 3y ago
      The scantron forms that were in use while I was in high school had a sort of meta-data section, where students would put their name, the date, etc. One of those boxes was labeled 'key'. I always assumed it performed that function, but I never tried it to see. Maybe the intention was to make it easier for teachers to identify a student maliciousmy marking it?
      - laverya 3y ago
gumby 3y ago
In the early 80s our entire SAT prep session consisted of being told one high school morning: 1 - fill the bubble in completely with the right kind of pencil or the answer wouldn't be seen by the machine and 2 - the formula of "if you don't know the answer, if you can eliminate at least one option, it's worth guessing". A lot cheaper and more time efficient than buying a book, much less taking a prep class. Perhaps those options didn't exist back then?

48 points by gnicholas 3y ago

https://archive.ph/rgqfl https://archive.ph/rgqfl

> Soon, however, teachers and government officials sought ways to evaluate rapidly increasing numbers of students. In 1900, roughly 10 percent of teens attended high school; by 1940, some 70 percent did. It reminds me of looking at a 1930s census, not long ago, while compiling a family history. Some of the adults on a rural farm were listed as having completed "4th grade". It's rather difficult to imagine a world where that was the norm and to compare how different our world now must be, when nearly everyone has completed high school.

JasonFruit 3y ago
I wonder how much the actual average level of education has changed, though the topics may be different. Could those 4th-grade dropouts read and understand a newspaper, calculate how many pounds of barley it takes to plant the south field now that we cleared that new area, and work out a 1-in-10 slope for the new shed roof? I bet most of them could, and that a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs — which may be less easily ascertained.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs When most people lived on farms (up until the 1950s), there was less need to be good factory workers. But there were more factories offering more employment in America, so the stats say you are correct. https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promoted-by-industrialists-who-wanted-docile-factory-workers https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promote...
- flangola7 3y ago
  What did they receive for humanities though? School is and should be about you making a better more complete member of society, not just a better cog in the economy.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  > i bet most of them could, and that a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs — which may be less easily ascertained. Interesting to order it this way because, as the engine of meritocracy, education is supposed to determine life direction, not be reflective of it. Of course this isn't how people actually think of it, but we don't live in a meritocracy either now do we
- pixl97 3y ago
  And pretty much all those jobs you're talking about are gone or low paying. Farmers aren't calculating how many pounds of barley per acre they need. They are operating computer controlled heavy equipment that does a huge amount of the calculations for them because someone thousands of miles away wrote magicial electric symbols in sand. The world is a vastly more complicated place now.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > operating computer controlled heavy equipment that does a huge amount of the calculations for them They're also measuring soil nutrient and nitrogen content, integrating global price signals into their sourcing and supply chain, and paying attention to the genetic characteristics of their cultivars. I'd wager American farmers, today, are vastly more knowledgeable about their craft, at a fundamental level, than farmers in the 1930s.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Wow. Someone doesn't spend time in rural areas. Where I live it's almost all third generation "family farms", those that are still here after others have left. The farms are bigger but they're still at core family farms and businesses with capital costs in the millions to tens of millions, run and worked by people that farm and almost all whom have other jobs and|or businesses in parallel. One typical neighbour is planting out several hundred acres, has a side supply business with the grain coop to site several five story concrete grain silos, owns and runs four or five local school buses (and employs drivers) with a partnership in a bee hive placement business (for honey but mainly for pollination in the district). Between them they all have a basic grasp of (with different members specialising) building, radio equipment, GPS equipment and data managment, double entry bookkeeping and employee paperwork for a million+ per annum turn over, mechanics for cars, tractors, bob cats, etc, agonomy, animal health, first aid, welding, carpentry, . . . Hmm, while I think of it the same family has the local volunteer fire chief (another part time job) who handles bush fire preparedness in the area, fire breaks etc. There's no reliance on "magical someones" thousands of miles away - those services are used, sure - but they're not counted on to be always available or there when needed - farming would just grind to halt with that level of unquestioning dependance.
- LarsDu88 3y ago
  Take a look at this entrance exam to Harvard from 1869: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde... Good luck finding high school students today who could get a good score on this test. There's vastly more emphasis on classical knowledge: Greek, Latin, ancient history, mathematical proofs...
  - wbl 3y ago
    If Greek or Latin we're still requirements for Harvard high school students would become fluent.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      They sure would enjoy the salutatory speeches delivered at commencement: https://youtu.be/LYewkFKPPhs?si=egbRqSO2lMVxIMzz https://youtu.be/LYewkFKPPhs?si=egbRqSO2lMVxIMzz
  - bhaney 3y ago
    I can't even figure out what some of these are asking. Question 5 of the History and Geography section is just "Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander." Am I supposed to write about what they have in common? Who they each were? When and where they ruled? Other questions seem to include some form of instruction while being equally short ("Compare Athens with Sparta") but that one and a couple others are just a topic with seemingly no direction at all.
    - LarsDu88 3y ago
      Heh, obvious a cultured man of knowledge (or anyone who watched the movie 300 and read wikipedia) would know that these are major leaders of Sparta Grant, Sherman, Meade Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle It's to filter the cultured elite from the unread plebes.
  - plorkyeran 3y ago
    I would expect most Harvard-bound high school seniors to be able to breeze through the math section. Geometry was a ninth grade subject for me so I probably would have forgotten some bits if I took this unprepared as a senior, but it wouldn't have taken much studying ro refresh on that. There may be some trick question I'm not noticing, but the Latin section seems extremely simple. Ancient Greek has certainly vanished from HS curriculums, but if Harvard was testing on it two years of Latin and two years of Greek would suffice to pass those sections. I think overall a Harvard-bound student today would do better on this test than a Harvard student from 1869 would do on the SAT, but I'm not sure if that even means anything.
cudgy 3y ago
“It's rather difficult to imagine a world where that was the norm and to compare how different our world now must be, when nearly everyone has completed high school.” Why? Are you sure that there was a significant difference between 4th grade in the 1930’s and 12th grade in modern days? Many students graduate high school barely able to read and write.
- stouset 3y ago
  Surely you’re joking that you don’t think there’s much of a practical difference between an era where 90% of the population had less than eight years of schooling, and one where the overwhelming majority have twelve to sixteen. I mean, you can literally just look up the statistics on literacy rates.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lmm 3y ago
    > I mean, you can literally just look up the statistics on literacy rates. From what I remember they're shockingly low for a world where everyone finishes high school. IIRC only about 2/3 have even basic functional literacy?
    - stouset 3y ago
      You remember incorrectly. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_State...
  - cudgy 3y ago
    Just because someone went to school longer, doesn’t mean that they learned more or learned skills they need to function in society. Also, schools today are full of distractions, class changes, unnecessary technology, and much larger class sizes than was present in the 1930’s. It's just not the same environment and simply comparing years of attendance is a naive approach.

irtefa 3y ago

I'm nostalgic for filling in those bubble sheets, even when I hated the tests themselves! They were a huge part of school culture.

gnicholas 3y ago
In HS I bought a mechanical pencil with .9mm lead. I could bubble in the circles with just over one rotation, and the rectangles with a single swipe. It was the best.
- nvy 3y ago
  Was it a Sumogrip, by chance? I had one of those too and it was awesome. I used it for everything and eventually lost it in undergrad.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    Nope, but it did have a huge jelly grip like that. It was a super heavy metal pencil, which gave it a feeling of gravitas.

bl4kers 3y ago

> The SAT will go fully digital next year; the ACT, AP exams, and numerous state tests have already done so or will follow. Future headline: teen hacker caught with stolen tests Also might be a good attack vector for nation states. Could get assets into prestigious schools or publish anonymously online to cast doubt on the entire system I've looked at the CollegeBoard's engineering job listings before and they were far below market rates. Wonder if they're adequately investing in their system's security

paulpauper 3y ago
that's why credit score/agency and other finance sector companies have so many data leaks. not paying top dollar for top talent and just not a high priority.
onetimeusename 3y ago
There is a history of tests being leaked in Korea and China. Here is an example https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-sat-one/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-... I followed the stories closely and what's weird is how little the College Board did about it. A number of times, whistleblowers would inform them about a test leak and even show them copies of it and they would do nothing about it. I think you're on to something as far as attempting to hack the SAT and the College Board just not having an adequate response.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  Students managing to manipulate electronic school records has been an issue for as long as they've existed. There was even a well-known case as far back as 1986, which was caught on film [1] at the time and caused quite a stir. [1] https://youtu.be/Hh_vLKlz2Mc https://youtu.be/Hh_vLKlz2Mc
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> I've looked at the CollegeBoard's engineering job listings before and they were far below market rates. I assume you can make that up by leaking the tests.

callalex 3y ago

We are still forcing students to use the same shitty Texas Instruments calculators with horrible screens, unacceptably convoluted interfaces, and criminally slow performance and power consumption due to these same standards bodies. Technology has been better than that for more than 20 years now. We’ve gotten to the point where current students can use the calculator their grandparent bought as a child. How will moving the SAT from a bubble sheet to a laptop change any of the real factors that contribute to this problem?

gnicholas 3y ago
I've never thought about the power consumption of TI calculators. I had an 85 and I recall changing the batteries occasionally, but not very often. I also didn't find the performance speed to be a hindrance during HS, including on the SATs. What did you use your calculator for that it was noticeably too slow for? How often did you have to replace batteries? I get that there are newer technologies out there, and perhaps it would be a genius startup idea to make a device that's just like a TI, but using modern chips.
- callalex 3y ago
  With current technology, 4 AA batteries should be able to power a calculator for an entire educational career from 6th to 12th grade, maybe more. Edit: in terms of performance, the buttons and LCD are very unresponsive, you can type faster than they display. When making any kinds of graphs with more than 2 functions, the drawing happens in the order of 5-10 seconds, modern hardware could do that in micro-to-milliseconds and get the CPU back to sleep to save battery. Anything involving regressions of inputted tables can take 10s of seconds, which again feels clunky and eats battery.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    No doubt. But is it a big deal to have to swap batteries once every couple years? I think the bigger waste is that these things still cost so much. I cannot believe that the TI-85 I used over 20 years ago is $70 on Amazon.

paulpauper 3y ago

"That model was more holistic than a multiple-choice test, but also prone to subjectivity and bias—and only possible, in part, because far fewer children received a formal education." "If the epoch of multiple-choice tests is truly ending, the assessments won’t necessarily be missed. Not only is the format inherently reductive—bubble-in question-and-answer forms have also been prone to bias." So all formats are biased.

tivert 3y ago
> So all formats are biased. Bias isn't a binary quality, so that's an oversimplification.

paulpauper 3y ago

Misleading title. Scantron tests have not ended. it's about proposed alternatives.

gnicholas 3y ago

The worst thing about Scantron tests was when you skipped a problem and planned to come back later, but then forgot to leave it blank on the answer sheet. Then all of your answers were off by one, and you had to go back and erase/refill. Some teachers would let you finish with the error intact, and then spend extra time (without the questions, just the answer sheet) shifting your answers down. But if it was a standardized test, no such luck!

F00Fbug 3y ago

I remember working on a project to put scantron machines in every public school in DC back in the 80s. We built the interface from the scantron machine to the DECmate II (a micro-PDP-8, if I remember correctly); async io in assembler... I learned a lot on that part of the project. Then we wrote the scanning software to allow lots of teachers to scan their tests in at the end of the day. Next we built a network over dial-up phone lines to allow the DECmates to upload their daily scans to a VAX (using Kermit, I think). Finally we built the tools to load all of the daily scans into a database and do all kinds of analysis and reporting. All pre-internet -- good times! I remember learning a lot about the scantron forms and realized that if you made a black box at a certain place, that form would be interpreted as the answer key and would screw up a whole pile of scanning!

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> if you made a black box at a certain place, that form would be interpreted as the answer key and would screw up a whole pile of scanning Out of curiosity, where?
- F00Fbug 3y ago
  In the left margin, about 2/3 of the way down... between a couple of alignment marks. But that was 35 years ago... I could be wrong. I always felt like I held an immense power with that knowledge, but never used it!!!
  - Nilocshot 3y ago
    The scantron forms that were in use while I was in high school had a sort of meta-data section, where students would put their name, the date, etc. One of those boxes was labeled 'key'. I always assumed it performed that function, but I never tried it to see. Maybe the intention was to make it easier for teachers to identify a student maliciousmy marking it?
    - laverya 3y ago

gumby 3y ago

In the early 80s our entire SAT prep session consisted of being told one high school morning: 1 - fill the bubble in completely with the right kind of pencil or the answer wouldn't be seen by the machine and 2 - the formula of "if you don't know the answer, if you can eliminate at least one option, it's worth guessing". A lot cheaper and more time efficient than buying a book, much less taking a prep class. Perhaps those options didn't exist back then?