Pardon me as I take a quick break from the frenzy of end-o’-semester grading. This is a school-oriented blather, so anyone expecting warm fuzzies about old ladies, pink-flowered china and elegant department stores may wish to escape. Run, I beg you; there’s still time.
I’m not sure exactly when they came into being, but it must have been sometime in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, when IBM’s punchcard technology was still the cutting edge (dull though the edge might have been). And to me, they were the galling example of Uncaring Modern Education. They were impersonal; they were purely objective; they were a pain in the wannabe intellectual’s ass.
They were ScanTron sheets.
They came in a variety of irritating sizes and pastel shades. You could get the Standard Test Size, which allowed about 100 questions and was a goofily unwieldy four inches wide. You could get the Exam From Satan size, which allowed 200 questions and was full-page size. Or, for teachers so abysmally lazy that they couldn’t grade a fifteen-question multiple-haphazard-guess quiz by themselves, there was the special and almost cute QuizTron size, roughly analogous to an 3x5” index card (and, if I recall correctly, always printed in cheery hot pink).
I didn’t like ScanTron for a number of reasons. I hated its insistence on filling in the bubbles perfectly; I always envisioned that my jealously-hoarded knowledge would prove fruitless simply because a Stray Mark, as the sheet called them, might result in Incorrect Grading. Even more loathsome was the fact that ScanTron was synonymous with multiple choice, which I regarded as the test of losers. I revelled in essay questions, which allowed me to a) display my knowledge at its pissy, didactic best or b) couch my actual ignorance of the subject in such an array of flowery prose as to confuse even the brighter pedagogues of Frederick County.
But lo, the shoe hath migrated to the other foot. The name that once inspired sneering disdain now calls a beloved old friend. The very word “ScanTron”, which once had a cold, efficient ring to it, now seems quaint and endearing—anything employing the suffix “-tron” is now laughable, a relic of a time when anything elecTRONic was new and remarkable.
And most of all, it means that I don’t have to grade forty abysmal ninth grade multiple choice exams by hand. MINE is the power of the almighty ScanTron!!! MINE, I tell you! I might have to read that stack of essays, each one blissfully unaware of verb tense, but the task of the multiple choice grading is handed over to the sainted ScanTron machine.
And oh yes, brothers and sisters, I’m using that 200-question, Exam From Satan-size bubble sheet.
I’m not sure exactly when they came into being, but it must have been sometime in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, when IBM’s punchcard technology was still the cutting edge (dull though the edge might have been). And to me, they were the galling example of Uncaring Modern Education. They were impersonal; they were purely objective; they were a pain in the wannabe intellectual’s ass.
They were ScanTron sheets.
They came in a variety of irritating sizes and pastel shades. You could get the Standard Test Size, which allowed about 100 questions and was a goofily unwieldy four inches wide. You could get the Exam From Satan size, which allowed 200 questions and was full-page size. Or, for teachers so abysmally lazy that they couldn’t grade a fifteen-question multiple-haphazard-guess quiz by themselves, there was the special and almost cute QuizTron size, roughly analogous to an 3x5” index card (and, if I recall correctly, always printed in cheery hot pink).
I didn’t like ScanTron for a number of reasons. I hated its insistence on filling in the bubbles perfectly; I always envisioned that my jealously-hoarded knowledge would prove fruitless simply because a Stray Mark, as the sheet called them, might result in Incorrect Grading. Even more loathsome was the fact that ScanTron was synonymous with multiple choice, which I regarded as the test of losers. I revelled in essay questions, which allowed me to a) display my knowledge at its pissy, didactic best or b) couch my actual ignorance of the subject in such an array of flowery prose as to confuse even the brighter pedagogues of Frederick County.
But lo, the shoe hath migrated to the other foot. The name that once inspired sneering disdain now calls a beloved old friend. The very word “ScanTron”, which once had a cold, efficient ring to it, now seems quaint and endearing—anything employing the suffix “-tron” is now laughable, a relic of a time when anything elecTRONic was new and remarkable.
And most of all, it means that I don’t have to grade forty abysmal ninth grade multiple choice exams by hand. MINE is the power of the almighty ScanTron!!! MINE, I tell you! I might have to read that stack of essays, each one blissfully unaware of verb tense, but the task of the multiple choice grading is handed over to the sainted ScanTron machine.
And oh yes, brothers and sisters, I’m using that 200-question, Exam From Satan-size bubble sheet.
posted by Daniel | 12:39 AM
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