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ABBYY’s Data Capture Technologies Help Bauman Moscow State Technical University to Monitor Students’ Progress

“Automated input of examination and test records with ABBYY FormReader 6.5 has not only reduced the data processing time but has given us an opportunity to take a serious view of our education process from a completely new angle” .

Evgeny Yudin, first vice-chancellor for studies at Bauman Moscow State Technical University

The use of ABBYY FormReader technology has made it significantly easier and faster to transfer student progress data from paper to computer, at the same time reducing the number of errors in the records.

Any educational institution is concerned with the academic achievements of its students, and monitoring students’ progress is a task that has to be done on a regular basis. In most Russian universities it is still usually done in the «old-fashioned» way – the students take their exams and professors submit the filled- in paper forms with the exam results to the dean’s office. This approach makes it very hard to analyze and assess the overall students’ progress, the progress of students in a certain department, or the progress of an individual student across his/her selected courses.

Bauman Moscow State Technical University decided to use new technologies for student progress assessment and to create a single information system, which would be able to store the records for all students and all examinations. This made the analysis possible but data input into the system still remained a tedious job. Each dean’s office had to print out thousands of exam record sheets, one for each group of students. Professors put marks next to each student’s name and returned the forms to the dean’s office, where the marks were entered into the computer system via Web interface. There were over 10,000 students at the university and manual keying took a lot of time, and, what was probably even worse, human errors were inevitable.

The university had to tackle the problem and it has been successfully solved with ABBYY FormReader 6.5 Enterprise Edition. The university has created machine-readable forms with a separate row for each student to record their exam results. Now the completed forms are returned to the dean’s office, where an enterprise scanner is used to scan them in bulk. Once the forms are scanned and recognized, the data are captured and exported to the university information system. For students who have failed their exams, additional forms for a second attempt are printed off automatically.

The use of ABBYY FormReader technology has made the entire process less labour-intensive, reducing the time of data processing and the number of errors to a tangible extent. Machine-readable forms are created by using a special design tool called ABBYY FormDesigner which allows easy and quick form creation and at the same time provides maximum accuracy when recognizing hand-printed characters regardless of the handwriting style. ABBYY FormReader automatically extracts recognized data from forms. If necessary, data can be checked visually via intuitive and user-friendly verification interface. As the result, a great job is done with superior accuracy, high productivity and little effort.

At the moment, the following five largest departments of the university are using ABBYY FormReader: Computer Science, Engineering Technologies, Power-Plant Engineering, Specialized Engineering, and Robotics and Complex Automation.

The overall number of forms for each exam is 23,000 documents for 12,500 students. It takes 10 employees a very short time to complete all this paper work.

The university is planning to use ABBYY’s technologies for other tasks of its own, including the monitoring of the students’ day-to-day progress and attendance rates, automated processing of application forms from would-be students, and the university’s accounting, which involves capturing data from invoices and bills.