ABBYY frees up professors to focus on teaching - not on form entering

Padmashree Dr.D.Y. Patil Vidyapeeth, with its reputation for providing an excellent education, has attracted an increasing number of aspiring university students from throughout India - in fact, the Indian university received so many applications that the institution, its staff and professors felt stretched beyond capacity.

The university offers a broad range of programs including engineering, law, architecture, hotel management, biomedical science, physiotherapy, dental surgery and management studies. In addition, the school runs a variety of special programs that include three-year degrees in information technology, computer engineering or electronics engineering, as well as certificate programs in craft cookery or food and beverage service. D.Y. Patil Vidyapeeth, as an Indian Deemed University, conducts entrance examinations for students throughout India.

After the exams were held, thirty professors, with the help of contract employees, spent countless hours manually checking each applicant's application form and answer sheet. "The time-consuming manual process prevented us from publishing exam results in any sort of timely manner," said Mr. Tushar, deputy registrar from D.Y. Patil Vidyapeeth. "It was disheartening to be unable to notify students quickly - and we knew that we must find a technology solution to our problem."

Last March, the University turned to NETSPIDER® India, ABBYY's major distributor. With their counsel, the school purchased two licenses for ABBYY FormReader 6.5 Desktop Edition, as well as an Avision 220 scanner. Using ABBYY FormDesigner, the university designed an application form and three versions of exam answer sheet for its entrance exam, including 200, 150 and 100 question versions.

ABBYY FormReader helped the school create an automated system that substantially increased accuracy, saved time and resources, and offered convenience to applicants. Even more importantly, the ABBYY system allows potential students to print a copy of their test admission cards from the Internet.

In the manual system, re-creating an admission card took up to 15 days, but the new system provides immediate access to a replacement card. "Previously, if a student lost his or her admission card, we had no way to reissue a duplicate card in time before the exam,"said Mr. Tushar. "This was a huge problem area that we addressed by using ABBYY FormReader."

Solution in brief: The application form and OMR sheet contains a variety of fields, including student information, test booklet information, student photo, signature and barcodes that the FormReader system has to read. After processing, the system exports the processed data (including student photo) into a Microsoft

Access database, which is linked to Crystal reporting software, and an automated test scoring system which calculates each student's score on the entrance exam. The data extracted from the application form is then sent to the school's accounting system electronically. This prevents errors associated with manual data entry.

Today, the university has automated all of its examinations to achieve similar efficiencies in all of them. The school is also embarking on offering online courses, and will be able to leverage its existing entrance processes for the new programs.

	About Padmashree Dr. D. Y. Patil Vidyapeeth Padmashree Dr. D. Y. Patil Vidyapeeth, a Deemed University, is located at Nerul in Navi Mumbai. The campus houses several colleges and institutes such as Padmashree Dr. D. Y. Patil Medical College, Padmashree Dr. D. Y. Patil Dental College and Hospital, Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology, Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology, Law College, College of Architecture, College of Occupational Therapy, College of Physiotherapy and the proposed Ayurveda College and Hospital. More details are available at http://www.dypatilvidyapeeth.org/. (Deemed University is a status of autonomy granted to high performing institutes and departments of various universities in India. It is granted by the University Grants Commission (UGC) of India.)
	About NetSpider India (NIIL) NETSPIDER INDIA specializes in ABBYY channel distribution and giving end-to-end solutions in various fields like imaging, networking, scanning, connectivity, Project consultancy, and doing developments around ABBYY technology. NETSPIDER INDIA has experienced technical skills in implementing ABBYY FineReader OCR, FormReader Enterprise, Desktop, FlexiCapture Studio and other ABBYY products. More details are available at http://www.niil.in/