Despite a painful familiarity with filling out Scantron forms, I’ve never seen the machine they were fed into. This video shows how they work, how the answers were programmed, and dives into its internals.
If you just want to see the guts of it, skip to about 14:30
I can’t help but wonder how much the rise of Scantron contributed to some of the pitfalls American education ended up with, from the rise of widespread standardized testing, to the decline of critical thinking. (Yes, I know politics play a role. I’m not going into that, but I will touch on it briefly. This is more about the test format itself.)
Multiple choice tests allow better “gaming of the system” than essay-style tests. Whereas writing an essay requires recalling specific information from memory, a multiple choice test essentially gives prompts - one of which is the right answer. If you can connect a given detail to a given topic, simply seeing the option that’s most familiar to you can lead you to the right answer. Given a test on the same topic, but in essay form, means the student has to remember not just key words that are associated with each other, but must actually have some understanding of the topic at hand. As a result, many of us skated by on multiple choice tests simply through word association or basic logic - not by actually understanding the material.
Scantrons were the golden rule by the time I got to middle school. It was at that time that George W Bush got elected and decided standardized testing was the way to go. Surprise surprise, such tests (in my schooling experience, at least) used Scantrons. Now we were full-on teaching to the test, a test which only cares about receptive identification of information instead of in-depth knowledge.
I get that it’s far easier to grade with these and other multiple choice tests, but if students aren’t challenged to actually know what they’re being taught, it’s a huge disservice to both them and the future. Multiple choices test have their places, but to truly know if a student is learning, it takes really probing their knowledge - which can be through an essay, a presentation, or even just a conversation. It’s no small wonder so many Americans struggle with critical thinking, even to back up their own arguments - we were barely taught to sit with our brains and actually come up with our own thoughts. Rather, we were taught to pick the answer that “feels” right. And now we’re here.
Maybe this would’ve happened without Scantron technology, but I imagine the rise in multiple choice testing accelerated this decline.