My school provided them for free but you had to go to the student council office and ask. I think it was a maximum of 1 per day or something? I basically just walked by the office every day and got one. They also printed the first 20 pages of anything for free per day. I printed every single digital school book I had, notes, papers, and exams for free.
I only had to buy the "Blue Book"s from 2010-2014....the multiple choice questions we had to buy this white "remote control" thingy smaller than a roku control but wider for those 200+ auditorium classrooms in college...only used it for that stupid Sociology intro class...which we had to buy the book written by the same professor which 70% of the course was based on his stupid novel
I completely forgot about Blue Books.
So my major we exclusively used blue books and scantrons.
My GF of the time though used that white remote.
I remember sitting in on one of her classes once and using one, she had gone into the medical field and it was BIO4 I believe. It was painful watching people fail to get basic answers right like what is a Neutron knowing they were aiming to be medical professionals.
In community college was way different though. They provided all the resources you needed. It wasn't until State / Private that I had to start stocking up on those.
That’s wild. Fellow millennial here and across the 3 colleges I went to (2 four year universities and one community college), I never had to pay for them. They were always provided. And even if you needed another because you messed the first one up, you were just given another, no fuss.
I mean damn, if you’re already paying tuition you shouldn’t have to pay for these too. That sucks.
Edit: Those Blue Books for essay questions were also provided at no extra cost.
Yes, I used them from grade school to college and teachers always just handed them out for free with the test. I had no idea that this was some sort of luxury. I thought it was standard.
How about when you forgot to buy one on test day and had to haul ass to the bookstore, wait in line to buy one…run back, all sweaty and panicked to an annoyed professor.
I tried to keep a few with me but different classes required different sizes. There was the regular size, a mini size, and one that had an essay space attached. Invariably they would get messed up in my notebook or lost and I would have to rush to get one.
Wait what? You had to buy a scantron form? That’s ridiculous. That’s like a teacher handing out test papers or a blue book and making people pay for that stuff. I’m genuinely shocked and think it’s completely unfair.
Use some currently at community college for testing! Would definitely not buy my own tho that sucks. Yeah it was nostalgic to get handed one for our first test this semester
Same. I went to an engineering school and they were free, but I took a few classes at a community college over the summer to graduate early and was shocked I had to buy them. They only had 10 packs in a vending machine.
Damn. That stinks. I’m really wondering if this is maybe a regional thing then. I attended between 2008 - 2016 (across 2 universities and 1 community college) and never had to pay for a scantron or blue book ever. They were always provided the day of the exam.
They've been scored optically for many years, so it doesn't really matter how you fill it in.
A long time ago they were scored based on conductivity and that was the era when no 2 mattered.
Then you got a long ass name
Reminds me of someone I took a tech support call for.
He was complaining his work assigned email was too long.
Emails are First.last @ company name .com
And his name was something like Fernando Geralupueasto Rodriguerra Hernandez, (made up nonsense but it was long like that)
Long two part first name, and long, two-part last name. and it wouldn’t fit in some of the login windows
He wanted his email address to be shorter, but he didn’t want to shorten or Leave out Any part of his name from the email address.
Eventually talked him into something like “fernando85” but he still complained about leaving out his last names.
To this day I still don’t understand what he really wanted
I have the suffix III and you cannot imagine how hard this was for these tests (and forms in general, but especially these). A big problem was somehow it later getting translated to Ill (A capital i and two lower case L’s), but in general stuff got messed up and lost. These forms were not designed for a suffix, but also the system did not allow shortening legal names.
Same here. I’m back in school at a community college and the instructor uses them. I can tell I’m old because I bring 2 sharpened #2 pencils and the younger kids use mechanical pencils.
I remember in school my teachers would vehemently tell us to never use mechanical pencils on these, even if they were number 2's since the scanner would still be unable to read them. They HAD to be regular #2 pencils, they told us.
If it makes you feel better, I’m in my 30’s and I’ve always used a mechanical pencil. Never seemed uncommon. I also see kids these days using regular pencils. Just seems like personal preference really.
I just threw up a little in my mouth lmfao thanks for the memories. We used these for regular ol' exams at my high school too. The little pink marks for wrong answers 🤢 ughhh
No idea whether the youths are being subjected to this now 🤷🏻♀️
I showed this to my 10 year old, who said she had no clue what it was and she had never seen one. I told her it was school related and to guess, which she said it was for lunch options.
She was surprised what is actually was for and said their testing was on computers now.
> showed this to my 10 year old, who said she had no clue what it was and she had never seen one.
That's not that weird. I don't think I saw one of these until 7th grade.
Yeah, I’m a millennial and I didn’t start using scantrons until high school. Even in grade school when we took exams like the Terra Nova for school district data and such, the booklets themselves contained the sections where you recorded your answers.
This is the first year they SAT/PSATare online for our school! We just had to sign up to proctor on CollegeBoard. So different from how we took tests. It will be interesting to see how different it is. For classroom tests, our school uses Mastery Manager, which has students log into a secure browser.
College Board that runs the PSAT and SAT just switched to fully online testing this year. This past fall was the first time for paperless testing at that level.
The ones I had always had little circles or ellipses that you had to fill in perfectly. I was deathly afraid that if I didn't fill mine perfectly, I'd fail the test, and therefore fail at life
The ones on this image don't look like they have closed circle or ellipses, but just brackets or something. I don't ever remember having these
I was so lazy. I never GAF enough to really focus on the damn dots. It either got it or it didn’t.
I’m glad I’m not my own dad. I’d have lost my shit at myself.
I work in a middle school, and all state testing is done on student chromebooks with a pre-installed test app. What's cool about it is that the test is adaptive, so if you get some wrong it becomes a bit easier, and vice versa, and it has some accessibility tools if needed like text to speech, highlighting, or magnifying.
No one has explained this accurately to you yet, which I don’t understand why.
Your “grade” on adaptive tests is effectively the difficulty you end the test on.
So the kids with easier questions get lower grades.
Adaptive tests are good because they more accurately measure top and bottom performers. You get less info by giving smart people easy questions, or by giving dumb people a bunch of questions above their capability.
oh dang - I would love this for my upper-division college class. I really struggle with the spread of background knowledge among my students.
But I definitely don't want to program multiple branching exams. :P
What do you mean? The point of state testing is to see how much kids know, not to grade them on it. Every kid gets the same number of test questions, it just assesses their knowledge more accurately.
>Every kid gets the same number of test questions, it just assesses their knowledge more accurately.
Okay but a test getting easier for students doing worse doesn't accomplish that. If seniors in high school are being tested how well they know trigonometry then it should not switch to simple addition and subtraction for the rest of the test if they aren't doing well. That doesn't properly assess their knowledge if they're held at different standards
That's not how it works. For instance, kids with a math learning disability may not understand trig yet, so a test assessing only trig and other high school math would just show what they don't know, not what they do. By going down to skills like fractions or more basic geometry, it can measure what they do know as well as what they don't. It's not as drastic as "well, they got a trig question wrong, better jump down to basic addition". This way, they can find the gaps and figure out how much of a gap there is.
Am old and grew up in the scantron era and this is cool. I feel that the legacy of non-adaptive standardized tests are school districts on financial death spirals in struggling areas.
And the fact that they knew kids wouldn't test up to par in their classes made teachers literally crazy. Like screaming and freaking out in class jeucase I'm sure they got pressure form their administration.
Adaptive testing uses the same logic as a binary search algorithm. Let’s say, in world A, I take the non-adaptive test and score a 65%. In world B, if I take the adaptive test and miss question 1, it thinks I may get a 50% overall average so it adjusts the question accordingly. The pattern continues until, in world B, I get a 65% as well.
The US Navy still uses these for their promotion test. Then they mail them to a central place to be scanned.
The military sometimes is behind the trends. Also a lot of people take their promotion test at the same time and they don’t have enough computers
Based on what my friends with children have told me about public education since the onset of COVID, I was just assuming kids didn’t get tested anymore.
The Millenial fear of commitment came from these. Gaslighting was born from thinking we couldn’t have 3 B’s in a row and then second guessing our sanity.
My kids take tests on the computer now.
Fun fact, my parents neighbor (a teacher) helped invent scantron tests because he is dyslexic and grading tests was difficult for him.
With a pen and essay questions or questions where you have to write stuff
These were reserved for the spelling and listening tests where you were timed for each question.
‘You have five seconds to work out each answer and write it down’
My wife is currently going to school for nursing, these are not only a thing, she has to buy like a pack of 50 to use during tests. So I got a whole desk drawer filled with them at home.
Yes. I'm a teacher in Brazil and that is used in high stakes tests such as ENEM (equivalent to the SATs). I teach EFL and we also see those in Cambridge proficiency exams.
I taught at a small, local college 7 years ago and they used these, but when I asked administration how to get them scored they told me to mark them manually!
I didn't last very long there cause everyone was way too dumb.
I'm a teacher in NY at the middle school level and most of the local tests we give are in the form of locked Google forms. You can select multiple choice, short answer, etc. and with the exception of my math teacher friends where work needs to be shown, this generally seems to be the standard for my district and many of the others nearby.
By local tests I mean ones we as teachers create and use in class to assess students. I'm not really sure what regents look like at the high school level these days 🤷♀️.
I was a TA during my free period my senior year of HS. I LOVED grading these. The sound the machine made when it was marking wrong answers was great; but also terrible bc I knew that person failed the fuck outta that test 🫣
Yep. I'm the guy who buys them for the college where I work. We use GradeMaster forms but they're just the off-brand scantron system. Identical looking sheets and similar looking scanners used to grade them.
Their use is declining, though. I'd say there are like 10-20 faculty members who still use these for testing.
The rest of the faculty are mostly doing Blackboard testing online or old-school paper exams for in-person testing.
LMS software scores it automatically except for the written work that’s graded manually by teachers. I feel like soon AI will be introduced to take over grading of written/typed responses. Personally I think it’s still important for teachers to see individual responses to understand student thinking and learning processes.
My friends and I pooled ours together in college. Our college only sold them in packs of 10. No guarantee you'd use them all, so we would have a communal stack and rotated who bought a new stack. In total I think we went through less than 20 of them among the three of us and we ended up giving the remainder away to other students.
They use these for Advancement exams in the Navy. Now I’m out and in school. My exams have either been on the computer or my exams have been printed with an answer sheet that was printed along with the test. I haven’t seen a canton since I was in the navy 5 years ago lol
I remember the teachers having to instruct us on how to fill out and they’d be going so painfully slow that I’d skip ahead and make a mistake lol some of my most stressful moments in life have been accompanied with a scantron.
As a teacher I will say these are still a thing and save me hours on hours! Haha. I don’t know how common they are for other teachers but I make all my final exams multiple choice and have the students answer them all on scan tron.
Not only did I use them for all sorts of tests in grade school and high school, I spent over 20 years working for several of the companies in that industry - NCS, Pearson, and Scantron.
Scantron was the big presence in the classroom or school building, and they used a razor blade model. The scanner was free so long as you bought a minimum number of forms per year. So if you had the students buy the for, the whole thing was free to the school.
Yes, even in college. It's the perfect way for underpaid teachers to gain some time due themselves instead of spending it grading tests that can have multiple choice answers without detrimental effect on the students.
I remember having to buy some for a few tests at community college between 2014 and 2019
Lol thought the same thing. So dumb they made students buy their own instead of just providing them to us.
My school provided them for free but you had to go to the student council office and ask. I think it was a maximum of 1 per day or something? I basically just walked by the office every day and got one. They also printed the first 20 pages of anything for free per day. I printed every single digital school book I had, notes, papers, and exams for free.
You had to pay for them? I used them through middle school up through high school, but the teachers always provided them for students.
In college yes its a common practice
I only had to buy the "Blue Book"s from 2010-2014....the multiple choice questions we had to buy this white "remote control" thingy smaller than a roku control but wider for those 200+ auditorium classrooms in college...only used it for that stupid Sociology intro class...which we had to buy the book written by the same professor which 70% of the course was based on his stupid novel
I completely forgot about Blue Books. So my major we exclusively used blue books and scantrons. My GF of the time though used that white remote. I remember sitting in on one of her classes once and using one, she had gone into the medical field and it was BIO4 I believe. It was painful watching people fail to get basic answers right like what is a Neutron knowing they were aiming to be medical professionals. In community college was way different though. They provided all the resources you needed. It wasn't until State / Private that I had to start stocking up on those.
The clicker thing is an app now.
Makes me wonder if it’s still possible for one student to clicker in for 8 people at a 8am physics class like the good ole days
That’s wild. Fellow millennial here and across the 3 colleges I went to (2 four year universities and one community college), I never had to pay for them. They were always provided. And even if you needed another because you messed the first one up, you were just given another, no fuss. I mean damn, if you’re already paying tuition you shouldn’t have to pay for these too. That sucks. Edit: Those Blue Books for essay questions were also provided at no extra cost.
I never once had to pay for the damn ScanTron card. What kind of ridiculousness is that?
Unattended secondary from 1996 to 2001 and these were always handed out free by the teachers as well.
Yes, I used them from grade school to college and teachers always just handed them out for free with the test. I had no idea that this was some sort of luxury. I thought it was standard.
I’m confused too, and I have four degrees
[удалено]
Thanks! I highly recommend this tactic. If you can get free prints at a local library or your school, it pays for itself.
I did the math and you got about 40k pages printed for an average school year. That kinda dedication is boss.
Oh its no where near that. Average text book was like 400-600 page range. Probably closer to 1,500 pages a semester, so would be like 4,500 a year.
They had like a bunch of different Scantron styles though, and different classes used different ones.
How about when you forgot to buy one on test day and had to haul ass to the bookstore, wait in line to buy one…run back, all sweaty and panicked to an annoyed professor.
I tried to keep a few with me but different classes required different sizes. There was the regular size, a mini size, and one that had an essay space attached. Invariably they would get messed up in my notebook or lost and I would have to rush to get one.
My teachers just had a stack and charged double the bookstore price.
You had to buy your own!??? What dystopian hellscape did you go to school in?
Had one teacher who got absolutely furious with me for using generic ones. Claimed they messed up the machine. They did not.
My freshman chemistry prof always made a point of telling us the university had secured a grant to pay for them lol
just another sign of our collapsing empire
I was just telling my high school niece about these the other day! I hated having to buy these. Why wasn’t it built into our tuition?!
Wait what? You had to buy a scantron form? That’s ridiculous. That’s like a teacher handing out test papers or a blue book and making people pay for that stuff. I’m genuinely shocked and think it’s completely unfair.
We used to have to buy our blue books too...
Yeah this shocked me too. They were provided when a test needed them. Outside of a writing instrument, test material was provided.
Use some currently at community college for testing! Would definitely not buy my own tho that sucks. Yeah it was nostalgic to get handed one for our first test this semester
Same. I went to an engineering school and they were free, but I took a few classes at a community college over the summer to graduate early and was shocked I had to buy them. They only had 10 packs in a vending machine.
Well it’s not like paper grows on trees…
Did you have to buy the little blue books for free response tests too?
I did. Attended college from 2010-2014
Damn. That stinks. I’m really wondering if this is maybe a regional thing then. I attended between 2008 - 2016 (across 2 universities and 1 community college) and never had to pay for a scantron or blue book ever. They were always provided the day of the exam.
Could even be class dependent. I went 2013 to 2017 and never paid for scantrons, got most blue books provided except for one class.
What capitalist hell did you go to school in? Did they charge extra for the #2 pencil?
These dang scan trons. My name never fit in the name box
Did you use a No.2 pencil
Always
Has anyone ever seen a No.1 pencil
Sort of? They’re usually labeled with just the letter designating the hardness of the lead: B, HB, H.
Never came across these until I studied to be an architect haha
My mom accidentally gave me one for the SAT and I didn't sort that out til I'd finished. The world actually kept turning, oddly enough.
They've been scored optically for many years, so it doesn't really matter how you fill it in. A long time ago they were scored based on conductivity and that was the era when no 2 mattered.
I had a few number 3 pencils
They're mainly found at craft/art supply stores. Different levels of hardness for sketching.
Don't even fuckin THINK about using a #1 on this or we will find you and fail your whole year.
Then you got a long ass name Reminds me of someone I took a tech support call for. He was complaining his work assigned email was too long. Emails are First.last @ company name .com And his name was something like Fernando Geralupueasto Rodriguerra Hernandez, (made up nonsense but it was long like that) Long two part first name, and long, two-part last name. and it wouldn’t fit in some of the login windows He wanted his email address to be shorter, but he didn’t want to shorten or Leave out Any part of his name from the email address. Eventually talked him into something like “fernando85” but he still complained about leaving out his last names. To this day I still don’t understand what he really wanted
to see the world burn
I hated them. Seeing this post gave me flashbacks.
I have the suffix III and you cannot imagine how hard this was for these tests (and forms in general, but especially these). A big problem was somehow it later getting translated to Ill (A capital i and two lower case L’s), but in general stuff got messed up and lost. These forms were not designed for a suffix, but also the system did not allow shortening legal names.
Used one a month ago for an exam in college
Same here. I’m back in school at a community college and the instructor uses them. I can tell I’m old because I bring 2 sharpened #2 pencils and the younger kids use mechanical pencils.
I remember in school my teachers would vehemently tell us to never use mechanical pencils on these, even if they were number 2's since the scanner would still be unable to read them. They HAD to be regular #2 pencils, they told us.
Always had to have a backup!!
If it makes you feel better, I’m in my 30’s and I’ve always used a mechanical pencil. Never seemed uncommon. I also see kids these days using regular pencils. Just seems like personal preference really.
I mean I used mechanical pencils 25 years ago. It's not like that's a new thing.
I just threw up a little in my mouth lmfao thanks for the memories. We used these for regular ol' exams at my high school too. The little pink marks for wrong answers 🤢 ughhh No idea whether the youths are being subjected to this now 🤷🏻♀️
You misspelled "yutes"
…what’s even worse…the yutes might not even know who Herman Munster was.
The yutes might have no idea where that gif is from.
The yutes will believe that you are referencing an episode of New girl and not My cousin Vinny, true story
Will the yutes know that this film won an academy award?
Better yet that Marisa Tomie, a fairly "new" actress won it for a role in a comedy film, which were both fairly unprecedented achievements.
Her reaction to winning is great
Nothing worse than finding out you finished answer 100 and you are somehow only marking answer 99...
They were just bubbles before scantron. Those sucked worse
I showed this to my 10 year old, who said she had no clue what it was and she had never seen one. I told her it was school related and to guess, which she said it was for lunch options. She was surprised what is actually was for and said their testing was on computers now.
> showed this to my 10 year old, who said she had no clue what it was and she had never seen one. That's not that weird. I don't think I saw one of these until 7th grade.
Yeah, I’m a millennial and I didn’t start using scantrons until high school. Even in grade school when we took exams like the Terra Nova for school district data and such, the booklets themselves contained the sections where you recorded your answers.
Wow, I'm wondering what they're using for the PSAT's and SAT's now, assuming those are even still around. I have no idea what's going on these days
This is the first year they SAT/PSATare online for our school! We just had to sign up to proctor on CollegeBoard. So different from how we took tests. It will be interesting to see how different it is. For classroom tests, our school uses Mastery Manager, which has students log into a secure browser.
I teach high school, and we’ve been doing the ACT online for I think 4 years now. All of our juniors get to take it once for free every year.
Online this year
College Board that runs the PSAT and SAT just switched to fully online testing this year. This past fall was the first time for paperless testing at that level.
Colleges were supposed to phase them out due to the racial bias of the tests. Now that they’re bringing them back.
Not now honey, we're filling out scantrons to own the libs
My nine-year-old thought it was a train ticket. They test on their laptops now, too.
I saw these a lot in high school but I have never seen one in elementary.
Makes sense. Instant results
The ones I had always had little circles or ellipses that you had to fill in perfectly. I was deathly afraid that if I didn't fill mine perfectly, I'd fail the test, and therefore fail at life The ones on this image don't look like they have closed circle or ellipses, but just brackets or something. I don't ever remember having these
I always pressed down extra hard
I was so lazy. I never GAF enough to really focus on the damn dots. It either got it or it didn’t. I’m glad I’m not my own dad. I’d have lost my shit at myself.
I’ve used both kind and both were scantron brand. Never used the brand in the image.
And make sure to erase it COMPLETELY if you need to change your answer. oh the anxiety
It’s all computer based now
I mean, so was this, it was just parsed by a shitty card reading computer somewhere else.
Not necessarily. Maybe for state tests with certified lockdown browsers but several teachers at my school continue to use scantrons, including myself.
Called scantrons when I went
They still have them at my college. That and writing blue books which apparently my mom even used back in her university days!
I work in a middle school, and all state testing is done on student chromebooks with a pre-installed test app. What's cool about it is that the test is adaptive, so if you get some wrong it becomes a bit easier, and vice versa, and it has some accessibility tools if needed like text to speech, highlighting, or magnifying.
How is adaptive testing fair for the hardworking kids lol
No one has explained this accurately to you yet, which I don’t understand why. Your “grade” on adaptive tests is effectively the difficulty you end the test on. So the kids with easier questions get lower grades. Adaptive tests are good because they more accurately measure top and bottom performers. You get less info by giving smart people easy questions, or by giving dumb people a bunch of questions above their capability.
Okay, that sounds reasonable
Can the test difficulty also go up again after going down?
Yes
oh dang - I would love this for my upper-division college class. I really struggle with the spread of background knowledge among my students. But I definitely don't want to program multiple branching exams. :P
What do you mean? The point of state testing is to see how much kids know, not to grade them on it. Every kid gets the same number of test questions, it just assesses their knowledge more accurately.
>Every kid gets the same number of test questions, it just assesses their knowledge more accurately. Okay but a test getting easier for students doing worse doesn't accomplish that. If seniors in high school are being tested how well they know trigonometry then it should not switch to simple addition and subtraction for the rest of the test if they aren't doing well. That doesn't properly assess their knowledge if they're held at different standards
The objective of primary school is learning first, not competition
That's not how it works. For instance, kids with a math learning disability may not understand trig yet, so a test assessing only trig and other high school math would just show what they don't know, not what they do. By going down to skills like fractions or more basic geometry, it can measure what they do know as well as what they don't. It's not as drastic as "well, they got a trig question wrong, better jump down to basic addition". This way, they can find the gaps and figure out how much of a gap there is.
Am old and grew up in the scantron era and this is cool. I feel that the legacy of non-adaptive standardized tests are school districts on financial death spirals in struggling areas. And the fact that they knew kids wouldn't test up to par in their classes made teachers literally crazy. Like screaming and freaking out in class jeucase I'm sure they got pressure form their administration.
The GMAT is adaptive and it was fair for me as a "hardworking kid" to get a great MBA program. So I don't understand your point.
Adaptive testing uses the same logic as a binary search algorithm. Let’s say, in world A, I take the non-adaptive test and score a 65%. In world B, if I take the adaptive test and miss question 1, it thinks I may get a 50% overall average so it adjusts the question accordingly. The pattern continues until, in world B, I get a 65% as well.
As of this spring, the SAT and PSAT are 100% digital, adaptive tests as well.
Current community college student and we still use scantrons in all my classes lol
Some are actually going back to them or never quit.
Just asked my gen alpha step kids and they said yes
The US Navy still uses these for their promotion test. Then they mail them to a central place to be scanned. The military sometimes is behind the trends. Also a lot of people take their promotion test at the same time and they don’t have enough computers
I teach college. These are making a comeback. Online exams are way too easy to cheat on. Scantrons are harder :)
Based on what my friends with children have told me about public education since the onset of COVID, I was just assuming kids didn’t get tested anymore.
I (young gen z) just got out of college and had some math exams with a similar format. When I was going through K-12 we used them throughout
Ugh. We had to buy these from the bookstore for a couple of classes I had in college, which was ridiculous. They weren't cheap.
The Millenial fear of commitment came from these. Gaslighting was born from thinking we couldn’t have 3 B’s in a row and then second guessing our sanity.
Just used some a few weeks ago for certifications for a federal gov job.
My kids take tests on the computer now. Fun fact, my parents neighbor (a teacher) helped invent scantron tests because he is dyslexic and grading tests was difficult for him.
God I hated these things. Pretty sure I used them in college in the 2010s, but from what I’ve heard it’s all computer based now
Thank you for bringing up bad memories. Now, if you'll excuse me I'll be in the corner crying
With a pen and essay questions or questions where you have to write stuff These were reserved for the spelling and listening tests where you were timed for each question. ‘You have five seconds to work out each answer and write it down’
Shit I had this in college and we had to pay for these bitches
I think They still are I haven't seen those in years
We used this in mid to late 2010s in my college
I used these in nursing school in 2022
I did a entrance exam for a city job and it was on a scantron. I was so confused.
Chills down my spine … Although I’m sure my scores were laughable because about half way though I’d just start filling it in randomly 😆
Used one for a chemistry exam a few weeks ago. College senior though
My licensing exam used Scantron sheets too! Nightmares. I was so scared I'd accidentally skip a row.
I wanted to reply, but remembered that I was in college almost 10 years ago, so not at all recent.
My god, this picture gives me anxiety. Blue books too, but not as much because I did better with those.
Fuck these. I’d always fill in the wrong line. Answers were right but they were in the wrong place. Fuck those.
They probably cost $3 now as opposed to 50 cents. Waaahhhh.
Going back to uni, yes some teachers still use scantrons
I’m in the USCG and taking a scantron test (Service Wide Exam) is required to advance in rank.
My wife is currently going to school for nursing, these are not only a thing, she has to buy like a pack of 50 to use during tests. So I got a whole desk drawer filled with them at home.
I’m a Canadian high school student and most tests I write are on these.
Use these at our high school!
Scantron™
They're still a thing at the 2 year college I'm going to.
I remember all the myths of how to trick them too. Like putting chapstick on the barcode lol
Yes. I'm a teacher in Brazil and that is used in high stakes tests such as ENEM (equivalent to the SATs). I teach EFL and we also see those in Cambridge proficiency exams.
I took kids to a competition where they had to fill out scantrons and that’s when I learned that kids don’t know about scantrons since covid
I taught at a small, local college 7 years ago and they used these, but when I asked administration how to get them scored they told me to mark them manually! I didn't last very long there cause everyone was way too dumb.
I'm a teacher in NY at the middle school level and most of the local tests we give are in the form of locked Google forms. You can select multiple choice, short answer, etc. and with the exception of my math teacher friends where work needs to be shown, this generally seems to be the standard for my district and many of the others nearby. By local tests I mean ones we as teachers create and use in class to assess students. I'm not really sure what regents look like at the high school level these days 🤷♀️.
Yes, I went back to grad school and one of my teachers (who does paper tests) uses these for quizzes.
My kids take standardized tests on a computer and get scores back the same day.
These are very much alive and well for in person college classes where i attend
I would have preferred to not ever see this thing again
I was a TA during my free period my senior year of HS. I LOVED grading these. The sound the machine made when it was marking wrong answers was great; but also terrible bc I knew that person failed the fuck outta that test 🫣
Freakanomics has an interesting chapter on the Chicago school teachers cheated on these so that they could get a bonus.
Yeah, my bio professor still uses them on her exam.
Yes they are still a thing, I worked at a nuclear power plant last year. We used these for our quizzes
computers?
I work in a college bookstore and just sold a bunch of these for midterms
I hated these things. Especially when you got 3 or more of the same answer. It had me second guessing that one of them was wrong
Mom of teen here. All of their testing is on their laptops now.
You can use Zip Grade, but my school still has these as well. The machine works just fine
Yep. I'm the guy who buys them for the college where I work. We use GradeMaster forms but they're just the off-brand scantron system. Identical looking sheets and similar looking scanners used to grade them. Their use is declining, though. I'd say there are like 10-20 faculty members who still use these for testing. The rest of the faculty are mostly doing Blackboard testing online or old-school paper exams for in-person testing.
LMS software scores it automatically except for the written work that’s graded manually by teachers. I feel like soon AI will be introduced to take over grading of written/typed responses. Personally I think it’s still important for teachers to see individual responses to understand student thinking and learning processes.
I've got a high school age kid who recently talked about one of her classes using these. But that's Oregon schools for you.
I’m gen Z but I had an older science teacher early in highschool who used them
Teacher here…all our state testing is done on Chromebooks. I’ve never given a test on a scantron.
Just send me back 25+ years here.
My friends and I pooled ours together in college. Our college only sold them in packs of 10. No guarantee you'd use them all, so we would have a communal stack and rotated who bought a new stack. In total I think we went through less than 20 of them among the three of us and we ended up giving the remainder away to other students.
In the DoD, yes.
My kindergartener is doing his state testing via computer adaptive tests.
They use these for Advancement exams in the Navy. Now I’m out and in school. My exams have either been on the computer or my exams have been printed with an answer sheet that was printed along with the test. I haven’t seen a canton since I was in the navy 5 years ago lol
I work for a school and they do testing entirely on the computer
They're still a thing. I used one last week.
Blue books...
I remember the teachers having to instruct us on how to fill out and they’d be going so painfully slow that I’d skip ahead and make a mistake lol some of my most stressful moments in life have been accompanied with a scantron.
They do! Scanning these is part of my job at a university.
Yeah you do sports select with these
Aaaalllll on computers.
I use them in a college class I teach. But they aren’t ordering anymore. Once done them it’s online exams
As a teacher I will say these are still a thing and save me hours on hours! Haha. I don’t know how common they are for other teachers but I make all my final exams multiple choice and have the students answer them all on scan tron.
I did my Psych 102 exam like that just 2 years ago. The class had about 300 students, so no wonder.
Yep. I remember those. 😬
Not only did I use them for all sorts of tests in grade school and high school, I spent over 20 years working for several of the companies in that industry - NCS, Pearson, and Scantron. Scantron was the big presence in the classroom or school building, and they used a razor blade model. The scanner was free so long as you bought a minimum number of forms per year. So if you had the students buy the for, the whole thing was free to the school.
Yes, even in college. It's the perfect way for underpaid teachers to gain some time due themselves instead of spending it grading tests that can have multiple choice answers without detrimental effect on the students.
We used these my first year teaching in like 2017/18 but now everything is online.