Barcodes precious art at NZ Authority

The New Zealand University Entrance, part of the national Qualifications Authority, has simplified the process of marking more than 7500 art students' projects with the use of a barcode system and several handheld scanners, in a dramatic change to its operations.

Bursary and scholarship students may enter up to three of the five Practical Art courses available. As all candidates present their work in a folio of four panels, and as all of these arrive at the same time, the Authority's Examination Services section had 7500 folios last year and expected this to only increase this year.

Manually matching all of these folios to the appropriate student and subject was a massive task, and had to be done as an initial step to record which work had been received prior to marking. These folios also needed to be eventually returned to students, and the Authority had to record an individual courier code for each folio so it could be tracked if necessary.

This manual checking involved ticking a record of work that is received as it entered the examination centre. The main problems with this process were that it did not offer an easy way to track where folios were throughout the examination process, and that it was a generally time-consuming task.

This elaborate procedure has been abandoned in favour of providing each student with a pre-coded label for each subject they take, which must be fixed to the front of the folio before submission. This label has a barcode that represents the student's subject code and unique candidate number.

The Authority selected Denso 6000 handheld barcode scanners for this project. Although folios are still visually sorted according to subject, the scanners are used from this point to log that each folio has arrived.

The scanned data is downloaded to a PC at intervals to allow examiners to compare received folios against expected returns.

The barcode logging has made this initial necessary step much simpler, and reduced the task from five or six days down to two. It has also proved to be more accurate, and enabled staff to more quickly resolve any problems with candidates' entries.

When the folio has been marked and is ready to be returned to the student, the courier barcode attached to each folio is captured by the handheld scanners. This has also very quickly become invaluable, especially in terms of the ease and time taken to track folios that have gone missing, have overseas addresses that take longer to receive, or if a student has changed address.

Although it has only been used once, the Authority can already see dramatic and immediate benefits, particularly in the time taken to keep track of thousands of folios that are each 820mm x 610mm. With this test implementation behind it, the Authority now intends to introduce barcode scanning into other aspects of assessing art folios, in the interest of further simplifying and shortening the process.