Optical Mark Recognition service update

Some colleagues may not be aware that the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) service continues to be widely used here at Loughborough as a way of delivering exams.

In Semester 1:

• There were 55 OMR exams. 24 were combined question/answer format.
• This represents a 19% increase compared to semester 1 2011-12
• The total numbers of papers printed (including spares) was: 7618
• The total number of OMR exam papers sat was: 6613
• The total number of OMR questions taken and marked was: 332,135

332,135 questions marked automatically… How long would these have taken to mark ‘manually’? If we assume that each question would take, say, 5 seconds, that would equate to 460 hours of marking. So, OMR as a technical approach to assessment still has efficiency savings to offer.