Question

I am using Scantron Cognition Enterprise at work to capture data from scanned forms. Building these forms is tedious at best, especially when it would be nice to have a library of pre-built objects to use. Unfortunately, documentation and on-line resources are scarce.

Does anyone have any pointers to find some resources for this tool?

Answer 1

Hey Jason, believe it or not, Scantron is STILL the standard, but this is not the Scantron you probably remember. Although OMR (bubble) forms are still used extensively in education, there are a lot more advanced technologies available to be added to them today.

Concerning Cognition, I looked through the available tags and these would fit:
“document-imaging” – Cognition is a document imaging product and can feed images and index values into most commercially available document storage applications
“OCR” – Optical Character Recognition, or reading machine print.
“ICR” – Intelligent Character Recognition – reading hand writing, usually in a constrained print format (one letter per box like a credt card application.
“datacollection” – the key purpose of Cognition is data collection.
However, there is not a tag for “OMR” – Optical Mark Recognition, or reading bubble choices, similar to the basic Scantron forms of the past. Also, I could not find one for “Key From Image”, another purpose that Cognition is used for.

I am a Cognition user as well as someone who markets it and I know that there are a large number of users in North America. Many corporations that use Cognition use it for sensitive HR functions and so might not have their usage of it posted in a searchable format. Many other organizations use it for safety inspections, insurance data entry, and also for testing and surveys – basically anywhere you have a large number of paper forms and need all of the data quickly entered into a database. Many users are using Cognition for sensitive applications are so are not likely to share, but I can share a few I have, you could also contact your Scantron rep and they might have something they could share as well. I have some decent ICR fields built for name, e-mail, address, etc. The ICR fields are best when you build in your own dictionary or database look-ups. The OMR fields are the hard ones to build, but I have a few of these as well. The easiest way to share these is to send you the form that already has the field built into it. You can build your own lookups from txt, xls or db files.