Does anyone remember the dreaded scantron test?
Scantron was (and still is) a company known for its testing systems that uses special forms and machines to automatically score multiple-choice tests. Students fill out answers on a special sheet by filling in bubbles, and then the Scantron machine reads these sheets and quickly calculates the scores.
I remember how ridiculously severe the exam proctors were back in grade school, particularly around using a Number 2 Pencil. One could not overstate the gravity of mistakenly employing a pencil with an inferior grade of graphite softness 1. It was not unheard of to witness security hauling off weeping children who had the audacity to pull out a mechanical pencil.
But why? Well historically the original scantrons would actually shine light THROUGH the answer sheet, and if a sufficient amount of light was blocked then it registered that bubble as being filled-in. This is why if you look at old exam sheets, they are single-sided only. Modern scantron machines use more sophisticated optical sensors and support double-sided exam sheets. The graphite in pencils has both reflective and absorbent properties.
Was it absolutely necessary to use a number 2 pencil though? Not particularly, but since the vast majority of quality control around scantrons were performed with a number 2 pencil it was simpler to just make it a hard requirement.
ANECDOTE
When I was a kid, there was a rumor floating around elementary schools in the U.S. about pencils having actual lead 2 in them. Breaking off the tip of a mechanical pencil in someone’s skin was seen as the equivalent of getting stabbed with a Nazgûl blade.
It’s amazing how, if you start to see a bunch of the same answer in a row, you’d start to question whether you’re getting them right. What kind of monster would deliberately make the correct answer be “D” FOUR TIMES IN A ROW???
Eventually, you started to second-guess yourself in a weird parallel to that scene in A Beautiful Mind where all the cryptograms begin floating off the pages of the newspaper articles around the room.
At the end of an hour long testing marathon, my eyes would be bone dry. And sometimes I’d just let my eyes sort of defocus while staring at the page to see if the overall shape of my filled-in answers contained a roughly even distribution of A/B/C/D.
I kind of wish they had introduced a new mechanic into Scantrons where students could shade the answer bubble in proportion to their level of confidence in the answer. In a world rife with misinformation (to which LLMs will only exacerbate the problem), the ability to accurately assess uncertainty is rapidly becoming an essential skill.
Finally, to help you re-live your bucolic schoolyard days and also for some PTSD, I’ve put together a short interactive multiple choice exam. Click on the bubbles to fill in the answers and submit it when you’ve finished!