The universities ending their Scantron services

If your campus testing center has announced it is closing, you are not looking at a local budget decision. You are looking at the tail end of a national one.

Over the past three years a steady run of universities has shut down central Scantron scanning, and unusually for this kind of change, most of them explained why in writing to their own faculty. Those explanations are worth reading, because they name two separate forces — and only one of them is about money.

The equipment is running out

The bluntest statement comes from the University of Kentucky, whose Scantron service ends after the Spring 2026 semester. The reason given to faculty is one sentence:

"Scantron services use outdated equipment, which will not be replaced or repaired."

Carleton University says the same thing in gentler language, giving its service until Spring 2027 because "the tools and technology underlying the service are at end of life."

Carleton's note is the more revealing of the two. The university piloted a replacement and found the pilot promising, but flagged a practical problem: it was not confident its existing multifunction scanners and photocopiers could handle the replacement at current Scantron volume. The campus devices are due to be replaced with more capable units later in 2026. That is the real shape of the problem — the machine is not just old, it is the only thing on campus built to do this job at scale.

The demand went first

The other force shows up in Penn State's numbers, which are the most detailed any institution has published. When scanning operations closed in 2023, Executive Director Angela Linse gave Onward State the figures:

"The total number of bubble sheets scanning in Fall 2022 (69,807) is 20% of the total for Fall 2013 (366,267)."

And on the faculty side: "The number of instructors using our services is 10% (173) of what it was just seven years ago (1674)."

A fifth of the volume, from a tenth of the instructors. Linse attributed it to "a steady decline in faculty use of scanning services over more than 10 years, and a precipitous decline after the return to campus during the pandemic."

This matters for anyone arguing to keep a service open. Once usage falls that far, the per-test cost of running a centralized scanning operation becomes indefensible even before the hardware fails. The two forces compound: fewer users make replacement harder to justify, and aging equipment pushes more users away.

Where the others landed

James Madison University — IT Test Scoring services closed permanently on 20 May 2025. JMU's replacement is the most instructive one on this list, because it abandons the central-service model entirely: faculty print bubble sheets locally rather than ordering forms, and scan them with a standard office scanner or a smartphone camera. No testing center in the loop.

UC Irvine — "Effective July 1, 2024, the Academic Testing Center will be discontinuing all Scantron scanning services." UCI gave no public reason, and pointed faculty to workshops on exam digitization — specifically, on how to "deliver and grade exams without a dependency on using paper-only formats."

University of Iowa — Digital Desk, Iowa's system for processing Scantron bubble sheets, was decommissioned beginning Fall 2024. Iowa is the exception to the pattern: rather than pushing the work onto instructors, its Copy Center still supplies sheet templates and scans completed exams. If you are making the case for keeping some central support through a transition, Iowa is your precedent.

The part nobody is solving

Read those announcements together and a gap opens up.

Almost every one of these universities points faculty toward online testing. UCI's workshops are about removing the dependency on paper. Kentucky's centrally supported replacements are Canvas, Yuja Quizzing and ProctorU — all digital. The institutional assumption is that a closing Scantron service is a nudge toward the screen.

For plenty of courses, that is right. But it treats paper as a legacy format instead of a deliberate choice, and for a lot of instructors it is very much a choice:

• No device dependency. A paper test does not care about a dead laptop, a failed login, campus wifi, or a student who cannot afford a reliable machine.
• A cleaner integrity story. A room full of paper and pencils has a smaller attack surface than a room full of browsers, and it does not require installing proctoring software on a student's personal computer.
• Less screen time, in a period when institutions are otherwise trying to reduce it.
• Accessibility that does not depend on a vendor. Font size, spacing and language are decisions you make at print time.

None of that changed because the scanner in the basement stopped working. What changed is that the scoring infrastructure disappeared and the replacement on offer was "go digital."

What to do if your service is closing

The useful thing about JMU's approach is that it separates two ideas that Scantron bundled together for fifty years: machine-readable answer sheets and a central machine that reads them. You only ever needed the first.

If your campus service has an end date:

That last point is the one to press. A replacement that moves your exam onto a screen has not replaced your paper test; it has removed it.

Where PaperScorer fits

PaperScorer is built on the JMU insight. You print answer sheets on ordinary paper from an ordinary printer, students mark them with a pencil or black pen, and you scan them with hardware you already own — a phone, or the department copier.

For a class-sized batch, that copier matters most. Run the stack through the document feeder, save it as one multi-page PDF, and upload it once; the pages are split, matched to individual students and scored, with each page reporting its own outcome so you can see which sheets need a second look. That is the part of the machine worth keeping, without the machine.

The rest is what a 1972 workflow could never do: up to five shuffled versions of the same test printed at no extra cost, answer sheets in 13 languages chosen at print time, and scores synced to Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, Schoology and Brightspace.

If you are the person being told the scanner is going away, the choice is not between Scantron and a screen.

Already know you are switching? Our practical guide to migrating from Scantron covers timelines, budget and how to carry existing tests across.