NZ Council for Educational Research

NZCER is an independent educational research organisation that provides research-based knowledge, advice, products, and services to clients with an interest in education.

It sends out and receives more than 120,000 student assessments to schools each year. The assessments require students to answer approximately 50 multi-choice questions and add comments in free response fields.
Since 2007, Desktop Imaging has supported NZCER by taking responsibility for processing the completed assessments.

Using smart imaging technology, Desktop Imaging combines the strengths of OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract students’ details and record their responses from each assessment paper.

A batch of 4000 assessments can be completed within three days. All extracted data is formatted in a CSV file and delivered via our FTP server so it can be directly imported to NZCER’s document management system.

In addition an Access Database and CSV file with all the data for each completed school is sent to NZCER by email so they can conduct a quality control check before supplying it back to schools.