ETS processes approximately 3,200,000 Financial Aid Forms annually by ETS on behalf of the College Board. The cost for key entry is several million dollars per year. Since most of the data needed for processing are numeric, a large cost saving can be realized by automating data entry of numbers. Machine recognition of numbers is not very successful when the input is not carefully controlled, so a means to constrain the shapes of digits was used. This paper is a summary of the results of a pilot test using data collected by requestors of Financial Aid in the state of Virginia in 1990.
