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Despite the following words are written in the early 21st century when smartphones and the internet already dominate the world and capabilities of artificial intelligence are skyrocketing, office professionals still frequently experience tasks which heavily lie back in terms of digitalization and need a lot of manual attention. This is especially true for the public sector, which inherently suffers from highly static and bureaucratic processes that are hard to change.

Initial Situation

Among other things due to these reasons, the cantonal high school of Sargans, a public funded school in the Canton of St. Gallen, recognized potential for digital optimization of one of its processes. More precisely, the school executes its admission exams once a year for hundreds of young students in just one day. After all exams are completed, the school has to proofread and score all exams. Afterwards, the re-sults are collected inside a spreadsheet which is then sent to the Canton of St. Gallen. This has to take place at the same day and the Canton insists on this form of data transmission. As one can expect this process is time consuming when execut-ing it manually. Therefore, an official of the school came up with the idea of a soft-ware application which is able to scan exam cover pages, recognizing hand-written digits representing scores and finally transfer it into a spreadsheet. This application would not relieve school employees from correcting and scoring the exams but from transfering the data into one central data structure. In addition, an error prone pro-cess (due to the task’s tight schedule) could be made more reliable and trustworthy.

Outlook

The project team is enthusiastic regarding the idea outlined above. Besides the fact that this mandate gives students the chance to develop an application under more or less realistic circumstances in cooperation with a true client, the authors also believe in the benefits and the overall impact such a product could have for school organizations. Furthermore, this project will require a broad mixture of technologies ranging from front- and backend concepts in the web environment to the wide field of computer vision algorithms. Therefore, the decision has been taken to tackle this challenge and the authors are looking forward to getting hands on an amazing venture and they have great confidence in a symbiotic outcome which will benefit the client as well as the engineering team leading to a picture-perfect win-win scenario.