My wife, who is a teacher, recently had her computer updated by the IT department, and unfortunately, all of her digital tests were erased in the process. We're in a bit of a bind because, without a better solution, she would have to spend over 10 hours manually typing all the questions and answers into a Word document. We're looking for a program that can not only scan her paper copies but also convert them into an editable format. Ideally, it would allow for the mixing up of multiple choice answers for different versions of the tests. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
5 Answers
Try scanning the tests as PDFs and then opening them in Word or Google Docs. You should be able to edit from there!
I've had success with that method in a similar situation.
If most of the tests consist of text, any decent OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software should handle it well. But just a heads up, images can be trickier. What kind of software can she use? Is she allowed to download anything on her work computer? Also, can she upload scanned copies to a website?
She can upload docs to a site, but downloading software might be a no-go.
Honestly, this is on IT to fix. They should be able to figure this out!
Consider getting a prepaid credit card and signing up for the free trial of Adobe Acrobat Pro. You can run OCR on all the PDFs your scanner creates. Just be wary—they can be tricky to cancel later, but their product is pretty solid with a lot of resources to help you.
Have you thought about asking the IT department if they can help recover those files? It’s also a good reminder for your wife to start backing up her work in the future!
She tried that before but said the document ended up being completely unusable.