Despite a painful familiarity with filling out Scantron forms, I’ve never seen the machine they were fed into. This video shows how they work, how the answers were programmed, and dives into its internals.
If you just want to see the guts of it, skip to about 14:30
We had too many students for the lunch room, so we split one class into four, so kids could shuffle in and out.
For me this was physics, which I went to several times before realizing I could just hang out in the break room and skip class.
One day, I felt some sort of pang and decided to go do the right thing and go to class. Well it was test day and the teacher had done the old run your own when you’re done. The error clicks were very obvious. That always irritated me.
When I walked in. I heard giggles and absolutely did not recognize anyone lol. The teacher looked quite bemused. Anyway I grab my test and Scantron pop through the test and finish only to see I’m the first.
Weird.
So, I wait until a couple have gone just to make sure I didn’t miss something, then I stand up, take the walk of shame and two clicks. I did better on that test than most of the class.
Anyway, I fucking hated Scantron.
I hated these machines lmao. Part of my job at the University help desk was to do the scanning for these in my downtime between calls. I also wrote the software the University used to process results and send grades.
AMA if anyone wants to know anything about them that wasn’t in the video.
I can’t help but wonder how much the rise of Scantron contributed to some of the pitfalls American education ended up with, from the rise of widespread standardized testing, to the decline of critical thinking. (Yes, I know politics play a role. I’m not going into that, but I will touch on it briefly. This is more about the test format itself.)
Multiple choice tests allow better “gaming of the system” than essay-style tests. Whereas writing an essay requires recalling specific information from memory, a multiple choice test essentially gives prompts - one of which is the right answer. If you can connect a given detail to a given topic, simply seeing the option that’s most familiar to you can lead you to the right answer. Given a test on the same topic, but in essay form, means the student has to remember not just key words that are associated with each other, but must actually have some understanding of the topic at hand. As a result, many of us skated by on multiple choice tests simply through word association or basic logic - not by actually understanding the material.
Scantrons were the golden rule by the time I got to middle school. It was at that time that George W Bush got elected and decided standardized testing was the way to go. Surprise surprise, such tests (in my schooling experience, at least) used Scantrons. Now we were full-on teaching to the test, a test which only cares about receptive identification of information instead of in-depth knowledge.
I get that it’s far easier to grade with these and other multiple choice tests, but if students aren’t challenged to actually know what they’re being taught, it’s a huge disservice to both them and the future. Multiple choices test have their places, but to truly know if a student is learning, it takes really probing their knowledge - which can be through an essay, a presentation, or even just a conversation. It’s no small wonder so many Americans struggle with critical thinking, even to back up their own arguments - we were barely taught to sit with our brains and actually come up with our own thoughts. Rather, we were taught to pick the answer that “feels” right. And now we’re here.
Maybe this would’ve happened without Scantron technology, but I imagine the rise in multiple choice testing accelerated this decline.
If you don’t want to watch the video, there’s a roller at the input side that feeds papers through the inspection and comparison chamber. At the start of a grading session, the answer key is fed in and photographically scanned. Student papers go in next and a very small person living inside the machine checks each line to see if they match what was on the key. Once this comparison is complete, they neatly write out the score in percentage or fraction form (depending on the marks in the key’s configuration section) before depositing the student’s page in the output tray.
This is ethical because the very small person likes this. They feel safe, and also like a productive member of society
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That brings back memories. Our science teacher still used this because he said the school bought a shitload of forma and then they went out of faahion, so he was trying to work through a tock room of thousands of these
Probably a pretty common scenario, I’d guess. Apparently Scantron had an interesting business model where they basically rented the machines to the schools for free as long as they bought certain amounts of the official Scantron forms.
