Digital production process
One of the best ways of reducing the risks is to reduce, or better eliminate, the use of extras from outside the examination processes professional staff. The phase that uses most of those extras is the printing phase, so any reduction in the necessity to have manual intervention reduces the labour requirements and automatically reduces the risks.
The use of digital printing solutions offers, the chance of reducing the extra manpower needed in both the printing and the sorting phases. Digital printing solutions do not need typeface plates, each paper is a digital entity or file, which can be either printed alone or mixed with other digital file(s). Simply put, all the papers for one school or examination centre can be printed together, without the need for manual sorting or gathering. Also the digital solutions available can be built so that some or all of the various steps involved in creating the finished booklet can be automated so that no manual intervention is required. So a digital print solution offers an in-line and fully automated workflow, from a blank sheet of paper to a finished folded, stitched and cut booklet. Even an automatic wrapping solution, not necessarily in the security bags, but in tamper resistant plastic packages can be offered.
Additional security measures
Encryption
The digital process also offers some other areas of help. As no plate making is required, there is no need for a “hard” copy original of the exam paper. The only copy is a digital print file. However, everyone has, at some point, heard enough horror stories about how insecure the web is and how dangerous sending digital files can be. Although the risks are typically much less than the media would have us believe, the risks are still there. A thing that can be done, is a digital manipulation of the file so that only specialized software can read it. This is called encrypting the data and can reduce that risk significantly.
Barcodes
Barcodes are very useful tools for tracking documents. They have the ability to store information in a compact manor and also in a form that is not readable without special reading devices. Although any printer, including offset, can print barcodes their real strengths only become available when digital printers are used allowing the barcode data to be variable.
Most examinations do not use the barcode during the actual holding of the exam. However in the complete workflow, they offer very important benefits. These benefits are not solely in the barcodes, since these are just tools. The benefits are in the way these tools are used in the whole process. The data stored in a barcode can be used to both control individual devices in the workflow and to measure the quality and integrity of the products itself. The former barcode control checks the process the latter the outcome of the process.
