Scantrons reused by teachers in an effort to lower expenses

As the juniors in Kim Anzalone’s AP US History class prepared to take their first unit exam last September, they frowned in confusion, noticing that their Scantrons already had one side already filled out. But Anzalone, noticing their surprise, assured them that the reuse of Scantrons was intentional and directed the students to put their answers on the other side.

“Reusing Scantrons is all in an effort to recycle and lower expenses,” Anzalone said. “It can really take down the amount of money and help save our budget for other things because we all have varying finite budgets.”

Scantrons are widely used by teachers as a result of their ability to test students quickly and easily. Teachers scan the answer sheet with a Scantron machine, and the machine marks the incorrect answers and stamps the total score and percentage correct at the bottom.

Though there are numerous benefits to using Scantrons, they are also fairly expensive and use up a substantial portion of each department’s budget. Depending on the type and number of Scantrons in a packet, the price can range from $26 to $51, principal’s secretary Pola-Michelle Alas said.

The amount of money the school spends on Scantrons also varies from department to department, as some departments may use them more frequently than others. For example, the math department rarely uses Scantrons except for final exams.

“We get a certain block of money given to us from the district every year, and I take that money and divide it up amongst all of the departments for them to spend on what they want to spend,” principal Paul Robinson said. “Every department purchases the amount of Scantrons they will need.”

For the English and history departments, the school spends a total of approximately $2,100 a year on purchasing Scantrons. This year, the English department has a budget of  roughly $5,500 and has spent almost $1,300 on Scantrons. The history department has a budget of roughly  $4,800 and has spent $837 on purchasing Scantrons.

Anzalone said that using Scantrons is “definitely worth it,” since they save time that would otherwise be spent on tedious hand-grading of multiple-choice and true-false questions, allowing her to focus on writing portions of exams and other assignments.

Anzalone first thought of the idea of reusing Scantrons when she was a teacher at Los Gatos in the 1980s, and has been reusing them ever since.

Junior Alex Ruemmler is one of many students who has taken a test with reused Scantrons and didn’t see any problem with it.“Most of the time one side is filled out and one side is clean, so it’s not like there are any extraneous marks that you have to erase,” Ruemmler said.

Math teacher Jennifer Mantle is another teacher who reuses Scantrons in order to stay “cost efficient and environmentally conscious.”

For her AP Statistics class, Mantle gives 10 multiple-choice questions per test and makes students use the same Scantrons for the entire year. While students would usually each need 11 Scantrons in a school year, reusing Scantrons for multiple tests allows Mantle to only use two Scantrons per student.

By reusing old Scantrons that are still in good shape, it saves resources and funds, Anzalone said.

“Scantrons are just one tool we should use,” Robinson said. “We are not struggling for resources for funding in our district, but it is nice to be frugal and useful. Hopefully reusing Scantrons is a trend that will continue and will help us not be wasteful.”