Exams Made Easy

style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">In
the wake of today's competitive educational system in India,
examinations are a crucial part of both the academic learning process
and of the university's administration procedures. Nevertheless,
with the increase in the number of educational institutions in India
and their entrance examinations, IT based rearrangement of
examinations is currently becoming more and more popular. But, there
are several educational institutes in India which are still striving
to integrate a right IT solution to switch paper based examinations
to a computer based environment, which further enhances the
examination structure of the educational institute to reduce costs
and improve the quality and speed of the examination process. Today's
business' tendency is replacement of manual input by capturing
electronic data. All over the world, more and more companies reject
monotonic manual input, because it becomes more expensive and lead to
considerable amount of human mistakes. The same trend is being
observed in the education sector. Universities all over the world
have to adapt to the students' fast lifestyle and evaluate the
examination sheets faster. Holding onto the similar ground, FIITJEE
one of the top coaching institutes in the country, which prepares
students for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for the reputed
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) across the country, went through
a turbulent wave in reaching out to several service providers for an
integrated IT solution. Having its HQ in Delhi, FIITJEE helps
students to prepare not only for engineering entrance exams, but also
for other exams like NTSE, KVPY, Olympiad, SAT and AP. It was
established in 1992, with branches spanning across 19 cities all over
India. Now, FIITJEE has 48 centers throughout India.

style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">THE
NEED

Having
gained popularity among students, FIITJEE needed to introduce an
intelligent data capture system with powerful tools for data
collection from examination forms in order to embrace the entire
examination process in a structured manner, speed up work flow and
gain more accuracy in the evaluation of test results. The traditional
approach to process examination forms was time-consuming and
significantly extended the educational cycle. The specificity of
examination forms used for the entrance examinations required a
comprehensive solution combining OCR, ICR and OMR technologies.
Hence, after doing a thorough research on the need, FIITJEE chose
ABBYY FlexiCapture solution to achieve intelligent technology in the
market to automatically and accurately locate and extract required
data from documents with variable layouts of any complexity,
including

style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">multi-paged
documents with variable number of pages and continuous table
elements, in a cost- effective manner by deploying automated data
capture capabilities. Being a channel driven company, ABBY selected
Mumbai based NETSPIDER Infotech India (NIIL) for the implementation
of Flexi-Capture solution for FIITJEE. NIIL specializes in ABBYY
channel distribution and giving end-to-end solutions in various
fields like imaging, networking, scanning, connectivity, project
consultancy, and doing developments around ABBYY technology. The
solution provider has experienced technical skills in implementing
the desired solution for the educational institute. NETSPIDER managed
to provide the appropriate application of data capture to undertake
the FIITJEE project and adjust to OMR format. Sharing the experience
while working with FIITJEE, Samruddhi Dhingra, director, NIIL said,
“We were glad to be chosen for this project. We are into
examination forms processing solutions since 2002, and we saw that
forms processing technology can be used in FIITJEE's project.
Automation of form processing has been a key factor in improving many
business processes and document based business transactions for some
time. Automatic extraction of written content for integration into
company databases and information workflows is now recognized as a
key factor for success in many industries. The FIITJEE's
installations are operating at its each center, and we found that the
users at various locations co-operated to the fullest while
implementing the solution.”

style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">

style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">FIITJEE'S
CHALLENGES

As
a part of training, FIITJEE conducts regular mock examinations,
practical tasks and phase tests to help students to pick up their
knowledge for IIT-JEE. Rapid business development and expansion in
different cities had made it essential to maintain an effective
system of test results processing and evaluating followed by a
relevant feedback. Previously, all the tests were processed manually
which required a lot of work and concentration whereas evaluation is
an indispensable and constant process prevailing in the coaching
centers. Moreover, manual input is prone to errors resulting in
additional time lags and affecting negatively the educational
process. Since the number of FIITJEE centers all over India has now
reached almost 50, it had detected an evident necessity of
introducing smarter ways of managing the whole examination process.
In its search for solutions, it decided to adopt digitization
technologies that were supposed to enhance the speed and quality of
test processing. Thereby, FIITJEE decided to change paper work flow
from hard copy to a digital work flow and to implement OCR, ICR and
OMR technologies into the scanning process, thus providing automated
data capture with minimum errors. The basic technology was optical
mark recognition (OMR) because of the pattern of questions in JEE,
which is deliberately variable, when answer sheets are the forms with
dark dots.

style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">THE
SOLUTION

At
the core of the project stood ABBYY Flexi-Capture 9.0, a powerful and
adaptable data capture system specially designed to automate the
process of critical information taken from forms, invoices and other
documents into back-end computer systems. The application was
embedded with ABBYY's award winning recognition and classification
technologies (OCR, ICR, and OMR) and offered built-in validation
rules. During the implementation of the solution, NETSPIDER also came
across certain challenges, but managed to over ride it successfully.
“During the solution deployment, we need to train a new person
while examination is taking place, which is a real challenge. We
sorted this by remotely taking control of the machine and explaining
over phone to people who work on this technology,” said Dhingra.
Thanks to the powerful set-up tools and flexible processing workflow
of ABBYY Flexi-Capture, NIIL developed a complete solution for
document processing of examination forms. Once the exam was
completed, the forms were sent to scanners and with the help of
unique ABBYY technology only necessary fields from these images were
captured. Information from the forms was automatically and securely
saved and transferred to a central storage location which provided an
immediate and easy access to the results. A special feature of the
project was technical support and the service is available for all
the FIITJEE training centers across the country. A significant number
of coaching centers across India and examinations conducted on a
weekly basis have become a serious barrier to provide appropriate
support and declare results on time. Finally, the solution was found,
NIIL organized online support for FIITJEE training centers which
allows to resolve technical problems.

style="font-size: 13pt;" size="3">THE
OUTPUT

After
the deployment of the solution, some of the major benefits that
FIITJEE saw, were that considerable amount of time was saved and a
higher level of accuracy was achieved. The staff does not have to
spare extra time for processing examination forms any longer. Errors
made in case of manual data entry were eliminated and the collated
results could be analyzed and implemented more quickly. “We have
found the NIIL team to be responsive to the centers wherever there
had been issues with software and its hardware protection key. We are
highly satisfied by the Forms Processing Solution provided by NIIL
which helped us not only to reduce time but cost also reduced
drastically. We are happy from the support of system integrator
partner, NIIL and the investment on its Forms Processing Solution.
Further expanding the business strategies with NIIL, FIITJEE has
given one order again to NIIL. We are using the NIIL's solutions
and other offering in other areas and bringing automation in these
new areas,” said Ankur Jain, director, FIITJEE, Chennai center.