High marks for Cardiff

A forms processing solution from Cardiff Software has cut a week from the time the NSW Board of Studies took to mark last year's higher school certificate (HSC) exam papers.

The processing took place at the Sydney Showground at Homebush Bay using an IBM Netfinity server, two Bell & Howell scanners, 12 TELEform readers running on PCs with 400Mhz processors, and TELEform version 6.1 running on a central NT server.

"The Board previously used seven data entry contracting agencies to key in the students' marks," said Dr John Bennett, Director, Information Services for the NSW Board of Studies. "We now have the capacity to scan, process and correct the same volume of work that these contractors can do in one day in only three hours."

The Board had to process 1.3 million forms, and the average throughput for the peak two-week period was 65,000 forms per day.

"In one two-day period, more than 200,000 forms were processed. This performance surpassed our expectations and has maintained a high level of accuracy," said Dr Bennett.