Scantrons have been a fixture of high school testing for years at McLean, but due to recent developments, they will be removed sometime in the near future.

“The county just doesn’t support the [Scantron] system anymore,” Assistant Principal Jeff Barham said. “Every time something breaks in our machine, we have to go outside of FCPS to fix it.”

This causes problems for McLean staff and students, who, when attempting to grade assessments, face long waiting periods for the Scantron machines to be fixed or for a Scantron machine to become available.

Instead of using grading methods like Scantrons, teachers are beginning to use a variety of other platforms, the majority of them online platforms like Formative and Performance Matters.

“We have switched to using Google Forms [for our tests and quizzes],” said Caylen Beight, a History & Social Studies Teacher.

Students will continue to find Scantrons in their classes, but this form of testing will be removed in the coming years.

“We’re basically waiting for the machine to break,” Barham said. “We’ll get rid of the machine [and the system] after that.”