OCR for scanning students marks??

[shadym]

Hi all, I work in a school where I encode students' exam marks and I
think there is better ways to do this thats why I am posting this
thread how do you think this might be done do I need a specially
organized mark sheet to make the OCR program read it easily and which
OCR program you advice me to use also it would be nice if you know a
good scanner that can do the job I was also wondering will I need
anything else suggestions are greatly appreciated thanks in advance.

 

[Danny]

Can you clarify the exams a bit?

Are they like a Scantron form ? (bubbled fields A, B, C, D,etc...)
Optical Mark Recognition (OMR)

or are there going to be students handwriting (Freehand essays, short
answers... ) = Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR)

or similar to essays studenst would create on a computer, print, and
hand in? OCR

The ICR is the least accurate beacuse penmanship of the student creates
a large variable for the software to understand. If ICR is
required,combed fields greatly increase your odds of proper
recognition.

There's many applications which excell at forms processing (Cardiff
Teleforms, ReadSoft, Ascent Capture, Input Accell to name a few).

Hope this helps...

Danny Ha

 

[shadym]

Thanks Danny for the reply

Sorry for not clarifying my intentions, the methods you mentioned is to
recognize the exam paper it self which makes me feel lucky they give me
"mark sheets" and its simply a printed excel sheets which contain the
following columns "student ID, student name, attendance, H.W.,
Participation, Quiz, Test.. etc." they distribute mark sheets to
teachers to fill out the students' marks and then they give this sheets
to me to fill out the excel sheets with it so I was thinking do I have
to recreate a printed sheet mark sheet for teachers which contain a
cell for every number like in this example: if the teacher have to
write 9.785 I'll create a cell for each number to make it easier for
the OCR program to read it, also do you know of a program that will
take the OCR output and fill it automatically into the excel sheet
according to "student ID", I don't know if that possible but I am
trying eagerly to do this and I don't know if its possible.

 

[rbelden]

Not sure if you have a solution for this or not, but I have been a
reseller for ABBYY Software for over 5 years now and have many
companies processing such forms using FormReader. Included with ABBYY
FormReader is FormDesigner that you can use to create forms that will
process very well using handprint recognition. You can of course use
any software such as Word or CorelDraw, etc. to create the form and
then use the Template Editor within FormReader to create a template
for that form. With the numeric data you are looking to capture,
recognition quality will be close to 100%, for fields such as the
student's name, the recognition accuracy may only be 95% since there
are many more variables, however if you have a list of the student's
names, or they can be cross referenced with the studentID field, that
can be used as a lookup to narrow the choices and push up the accuracy
level much higher. FormReader will also export in many standard
formats such as Excel (XLS), XML, CSV, text, or to any ODBC Database,
or a custom export script can be done to meet any need.
Ray Belden
413 736-1400 x130
http://form-reader.com