do our scantron sheets marked by machines or profs and TAs?

They're marked by a scantron machine. If there is something wrong, in my experience, typically the professor is the one who will do any revision or remarking.

Those sheets are expensive; they wouldn't pay all that money for them just to have them marked by hand.

Originally Posted by starfish

Those sheets are expensive; they wouldn't pay all that money for them just to have them marked by hand.

Why is that? I thought it was just piece of paper with stuff printed on it. Hardly a reason to make it expensive.

Originally Posted by GeorgeLucas

Why is that? I thought it was just piece of paper with stuff printed on it. Hardly a reason to make it expensive.

No idea - they have to make it line up exactly or something? I just know that when I took an elective from the social sciences faculty (which gets less funding than science), they didn't use scantrons for multiple choice tests, and they told us it was because they were too expensive, and apparently it was cheaper to pay the TAs to mark them by hand (50 questions x 150 students). I was very surprised because in one of my biochem classes, they had weekly 5-question quizzes and they gave all ~200 of us scantron sheets to use for those 5 questions every week

I think it's not the papers but rather the actual scanning machine that is expensive. The paper has special marks on it for the computer to line up the scanned image for further computation, so it's the machine that is tricky.

Originally Posted by GeorgeLucas

I think it's not the papers but rather the actual scanning machine that is expensive. The paper has special marks on it for the computer to line up the scanned image for further computation, so it's the machine that is tricky.

I thought it had something to do with them copyrighting the idea of a sheet of paper being bubbled in and scanned by a machine with summarized results. My high school teacher let us use the scantron machine for us to try to half fill in the bubbles and see how it worked. It looked like an old VCR style and was not high tech at all... but short of a copyright I have no idea why no one else uses something better