Despite a painful familiarity with filling out Scantron forms, I’ve never seen the machine they were fed into. This video shows how they work, how the answers were programmed, and dives into its internals.
If you just want to see the guts of it, skip to about 14:30
I hated these machines lmao. Part of my job at the University help desk was to do the scanning for these in my downtime between calls. I also wrote the software the University used to process results and send grades.
AMA if anyone wants to know anything about them that wasn’t in the video.