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Janis Shaeffer
I took a district-administered ACT today, and I erased a few answers and filled in a different bubble very darkly. The erased bubble was on the grayish side with the eraser I was using. In my experience with regular scantrons, they see both of them as marked and score it wrong. I assume the ACT grades with more sensitive equipment, but has anyone had problems with this? Is it known to be an issue?
The ACT advises students to "Erase any mark completely and cleanly without smudging" on multiple choice to avoid errors in automated scoring. Theoretically, this means there's a risk that the scantron will mark your answer as incorrect. It's hard for me to say exactly what will happen in your case because I don't know how light or dark the erased answer ended up looking. However, from what I've read in other forums where people have asked similar questions, it's very rare for scantrons to make these types of mistakes.
Scantron testing has become ubiquitous in its use among secondary education and higher education instructors of all disciplines. Though not error-proof, the tests allow for speed and accuracy in grading multiple choice exams, producing nearly immediate scores and (in new models), recording and storing scores in a generated file. Interpreting scantron scores involves correctly operating the reader, and using the results to refine testing procedures and the exams themselves.
Record the data. 888P+ scantrons will mark incorrect answers with a red bar and total the the amount of correct answers and the exam percentage at the bottom of the exam. ES2010 scantrons will record answers the same way as well as store information as a plain text file that can be imported onto a spreadsheet or into a database. This machine will also help instructors extrapolate certain testing information that can help "grade" the questions.
Interpret the information. Instructors can use scantron scores to record raw scores, create a grading scale based on student performance, and/or adjust grades and the exam itself using biserial numbers which correlate individual questions to performance on the exam as a whole. A score of "0" to plus or minus "1" reveals the appropriateness of an individual exam question, where "+1" indicates a question that was repeatedly answered correctly by high performers and answered incorrectly by lower performers. If a question receives a low biserial score, it may have been either too simple, or too complex for test takers.