Patent ID: 7555145

Claim:
A method of using at least one response bubble on a scannable form to be read by a scanning system, the method comprising: (a) defining an unambiguous symbology of non-alphanumeric marks to fill into each response bubble, thereby allowing at least one of a plurality of different non-empty intended responses having different output values to be entered into each response bubble; (b) providing at least one response bubble on the scannable form to be filled in according to the defined symbology of unambiguous non-alphanumeric marks; and (c) scanning a filled in form with the scanning system and processing an image of the scanned form to: (i) identify pixels associated with each response bubble, (ii) interpret the pixels associated with each response bubble to define a raw score according to the defined unambiguous symbology of non-alphanumeric marks used to mark each response bubble, (iii) translate the raw score for each response bubble into one of the plurality of different non-empty intended responses, and (iv) output the value of the non-empty intended response for each response bubble, wherein the different output values have different meanings, and wherein the output value of the non-empty intended response for each response bubble is determined solely from the marks filled into the response bubble.