Galway and Mayo Institute of Technology is now one of Ireland largest third level collages. In addition to end of term exams, GMIT like their counterparts in other third level collages, are using MCQ to continually assess students. The primary aim of MCQ is to highlight students in difficulty early so that appropriate remedies can be put in place. Students are presented with randomly selected questions with four possible answers. The Student highlights the answer by ticking the box.

With such a large student population, the collage embarked on a project ascertain how technology could assist them in processing these answer sheets in an efficient manner while at the same time ensuring the accuracy of the results.

Inpute Technologies were selected to implement a forms processing solution, which will scan and recognise ICR (hand print) OCR (optical character recognition) and OMR (optical mark recognition) fields. The system will be operational for GMIT's new academic year commencing in September.