While we were at the Florida Educational Technology Conference we were surprised to see that Encyclopedia Britanica, Worldbook and Scantron are still alive and kicking. But what’s even better is that Scantron has evolved over the years to become one of the biggest players in Big Data for educational analytics.

Yes, we’re talking about the same Scantron Corporation that’s been around since the 1970’s. They’re the company that revolutionized the number 2 pencil required bubble test.

Back in the day, teachers, schools, curriculum providers and national testing centers would create their testing material. Once the material was done they would set it up and code a Scantron test sheet. This information would allow a Scantron machine to grade a multiple choice or true/false test. Teachers would set their answers to a master sheet that would tell the Scantron machine what the correct answers of any test were. Then the machine would look at the students test sheets and see how many answers the students got right.

Scantron was revolutionary in the educational technology space back then. The Scantron test made it easy for teachers and schools to grade hundreds of tests at a time. The only downfall was that the tests could only have multiple choice or true/false question formats.

Scantron has evolved over the years.

They still offer the bubble test, but even that has greatly improved. First off, it no longer matters what kind of writing utensil the student decides to use. Even better though, the questions don’t have to be multiple choice or true/false. The latest version of Scantron actually scans and then uses optical image and optical character recognition to see if the student has the test answers correct. When there is a discrepancy a teacher can look at the test on a tablet or computer and decide on the answer themselves.

In addition to testing though, Scantron has firmly implanted themselves at the top of the big data in education food chain, at least at the K-12 level.

Scantron uses a variety of products, from their original bubble testing products, to new products that allow students to take tests on computers, laptops and tablets. But now there’s much more to the test than the test itself. Scantron is able to analyze various data points from a students test, demographics and even their portfolio of work. This allows both teachers and administrators to get a much more robust picture of where the student is at academically.

Scantron also makes a dashboard for administrators and a separate dashboard for teachers that allows teachers to see the important data, where as ten years ago only administrators got to see the testing data.

Learn more about Scantron here.