The Effects of the Scantron on Education: A Teacher's Perspective

I hate Scantrons. You know, those little sheets on which you must use a No. 2 pencil to bubble in your answer choice? I can't tell you how many headaches and neck aches I got from looking back and forth from the test sheet to the Scantron. And oh, the horror, should you accidentally bubble in the wrong choice. Erasing your answer completely was a nightmare!

Not only is taking a test on a Scantron a pain in the neck, but I believe the Scantron -- or at least what it represents -- will single-handedly destroy education for our young people (if it hasn't already).

Education has gone the way of the automotive industry, the customer call center, the fast food joint. It's all about efficiency. There are too few teachers in wildly overcrowded classrooms (or portables). There simply isn't enough time to grade stacks and stacks of essays or pore over piles of arithmetic work.

And so we have the Scantron. It's quick and painless for teachers. Just pop the answer sheet into the computer scanner, and voila! Instant grades.

But what are we sacrificing for this efficiency? We're graduating students who can't write a complete sentence. Students can't balance a checkbook. And worse, we are graduating students who cannot think for themselves.

I taught a college-level journalism class in January 2007, and I posed an ethical dilemma for my students. I asked them their opinion of the following situation: Suppose you are a husband and father, and you are caught by police soliciting a prostitute. You have never done anything of the sort before, but the newspaper has access to your arrest record (this is public record, available to anyone who asks to see it). What are the ethical dilemmas of publishing the names of the arrested?

To me, this is a highly sensitive topic. I thought surely hands would be waving in the air, students jumping out of their seats to give me their opinion. But not one hand went up. I spent 15 minutes trying to coax an original thought out of anyone.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the result of our Scantron education system.

Instead of writing solid essays of original thoughts, students are encouraged to regurgitate garbage they find on the Internet or ... well, let's face it, most students use the Internet as their one and only source for research nowadays.

Students need teachers with original ideas, grading papers, looking over math work, not just giving points for correctly regurgitating the right multiple choice answer. Sure, grading essays for 40 or more students is a lot of hard work (I should know, I did it). But that's what teaching is about.

To get students at an acceptable education level, they need to be reading, writing and working out math problems on paper, not in some bubble-happy, computer-graded school sytem. And if we continue down the path of efficient school systems, we'll be horribly failing our young people who count on us to provide them with a solid education.