Method and system for redundant data capture from scanned documents

Abstract

Embodiments of the invention may be used to capture student markings on assessment documents. Embodiments of the invention may be used for selected response questions or constructed response questions. Embodiments of the invention may be particularly suited to process exceptional marks.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE OF RELATED APPLICATION[0001]This application claims the benefit under 35 U.S.C. § 119 of the filing date of provisional patent application Ser. No. 60 / 918,073 filed Mar. 15, 2007 which is incorporated herein by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]1. Field of Invention[0003]This invention generally relates to capturing data from paper or other documents, and more specifically, to capturing student markings on assessment documents.[0004]2. Description of the Background Art[0005]The assessment industry is a multi-million dollar industry focused largely on assessing students in grades K through 12. With the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, the extent and consequences of testing have increased dramatically. The increase in assessments has stressed the limits of the testing industry with more documents to be processed and ever increasing demands for faster document preparation and scoring. Such increasing demands have also resulted in assessmen...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0013]Some embodiments embodying aspects of the present invention provide for determining more trustworthy data and for more effectively utilizing available resources to enable more trustworthy data determination. Some embodiments also provide for extracting data from target documents by more accurately identifying marks on such document and more accurately differentiating between intended marks (and / or various types of such marks) and other marks. Such data extraction may be determined using only a single scan of a corresponding assessment or other target document portion, using only inexpensive scanning systems and / or non-precision paper, and / or in conjunction with hardcopy, electronic or combined source documents, among other aspects, thereby enabling problems of conventional or other response capturing systems to be avoided and / or further advantages to be achieved.

Problems solved by technology

Such increasing demands have also resulted in assessment processing errors, some of which have gone undetected until after scores have been released to customers.

However, while such systems have benefited from increasingly sophisticated hardware and OMR techniques, they nevertheless depend on proper physical interaction between the scanning hardware and the paper assessment documents.

As a result, current systems are inherently subject to mechanical and other errors.

One vendor, for example, was unable to accurately capture SR item responses on a recent SAT®, the test formerly known as the Scholastic Achievement Test, the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the Scholastic Assessment Test.

As was demonstrated, the conventional process of using a single pass of the sheet through a document scanner and a single, generalized extraction of an OMR value for each student response may fail to accurately identify student responses, let alone intended marks.

However, since some documents may be improperly read by the vendor's scanning systems, passing the documents through the same scanner in the same manner for a second time may well reproduce the very same or similar failures.

However, the increased time and cost of even this inventor's proposal would likely meet some disapproval in the highly competitive assessment industry.

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