Scantron 888P+ Machines Deliver Standalone Unhackable Test Scoring

The Scantron: These Machines Were Not Networked And Nearly Unhackable.

Today we are obsessed with networked computers, cloud scoring, and AI proctoring, it is easy to overlook one of the most elegantly powerful pieces of educational and electoral technology ever built: the standalone

Scantron optical mark recognition (OMR) test-scoring machine and voting tabulators. Models like the iconic 888P+ (and its predecessors and contemporaries from the 1970s through the 1990s) did not need an external computer, operating system, or network connection.

A single specially marked answer sheet—functioning as what users often called the “key card” or key form was all that was required to program the entire scoring logic.

Read how they worked.

I used Scantrons many times over the years in multiple school districts, first likely circa' 1996 or so. And the 'tech' carried over into schools as recent as the 2010s albeit usually for small-scale specific quizzes and tests.

Beyond the typical testing uses, I also adopted them for use as a 'standard set' by creating a master key sheet that a student could compare to their own 'pre-knowledge' against a series of questions and/or tasks leading into a project. They wouldn't see the master of course, but their scanned sheet would produce a correct/not correct output for them to ID the tasks or questions they then needed to do more work on.

I had acquired a couple unused Scantrons that were set for disposal in one school about 25 years ago that I kept with me into a two more classrooms for this same 'pre-test' process. There was no cheating/hacking for sure.