Cintas Pass Examination

After nearly 18 months of trials and system testing, Cintas has been selected by RM to become one of its major partners in the delivery of examination paper e-marking.

RM is the leading supplier of ICT to UK education and since 2003 has been offering e-marking services to a number of examination boards and professional bodies. In particular, their scoris® system has been adopted by Cambridge Assessment, Europe’s largest assessment agency.

Once students have completed their written papers, Cintas's scanning and logistics operations take over to create tens of millions of digital images each year.

Cintas has one of the largest scanning capacities in Europe and specialist teams of staff who can ramp up to the volumes required during the peak schools’ examination seasons.

"This agreement is a significant next step in our partnership with Cintas as we work together to transform the assessment process for RM’s clients"

When Cintas took on the first trials in early 2007, a number of scanning services providers had attempted to tackle the complex issues but come up short. The problems surrounding logistics, managing peak volumes and the incredibly tight time requirements associated with secure delivery of examination results needed considerable attention and resource.

Cintas was one of the first Companies to adopt the use of the Imagetrac scanning systems in the UK and this decision enabled high volumes to be managed at key times.

Once scanned, the ability to upload images fast was essential and with Cintas’s development and IT expertise, systems were developed to cope with the huge volumes of data needed for the next stages of the e-marking process.

To support their work for RM, Cintas has developed a range of specialist support products including Examtrac that allows data that has been created from the scanning process to be quickly processed and uploaded for e-marking. These systems are used exclusively with RM and are being continually developed to complement the other parts of the e-marking process.

Speaking after the signing of a long term managed service agreement between the parties, Stuart Hatton, RM's Services Manager said:

“After a successful period of volume pilots, I’m very pleased that we are now going to continue to grow our work with Cintas. This agreement is a significant next step in our partnership with them as we work together to transform the assessment process for RM’s clients”.