Marking
How to scan a class set for marking (and keep the review queue short)
The scan is the part of automatic marking a teacher actually controls. Get the pile through the copier cleanly and there is very little left to check; feed it through badly and you end up eyeballing the whole class set anyway.
Any tool that marks handwriting is reading a picture of a page, and it can only read what the picture shows. So the quality of that picture — full page, straight, sharp, dark enough — decides how much work is left for you at the end. Everything below works on the machine already in your staffroom; you don't need a special scanner.
Scan the whole pile to one PDF
The staffroom copier's document feeder is the right tool. Put the completed class set in the feeder, scan to PDF, and send the file to yourself. One PDF for the whole class set is fine — better than fine. AutoMark splits that file into one paper per student using the names written on the pages, so long as you tick the box on upload saying the file holds several students' papers stacked together. Without that tick it's treated as one very long paper.
A desktop flatbed works too, one page at a time, and phone photos will do at a pinch. But if there's a feeder within walking distance, use it: faster, squarer, and one file instead of thirty.
The settings that matter
Copiers vary, and the menu wording varies more. Four things are worth checking on whatever machine you have.
Scan the full page
Not a cropped, trimmed or "fit to content" version. Trimmed edges cut off answer boxes, and a box that isn't in the picture can't be read out of it. If the copier offers a page size, set it to the size you printed on.
Keep it portrait and keep it straight
Square the pile up before it goes in the feeder, and don't overfill the tray. A page that feeds through at an angle is harder to line up with the printed paper — skew is one of the easier ways to send a whole run into the review queue.
Standard document setting, not the fax or line-art mode
Greyscale or colour, rather than a pure black-and-white line-art mode. Line-art and fax settings decide pixel by pixel whether something is ink or paper — and faint pencil loses that argument. Grey shading is exactly what a light pencil stroke looks like, so a mode that throws away grey throws away the answer. The copier's ordinary document setting is usually right; it's the default for a reason, and the same setting is normally sharp enough for handwriting, so leave the resolution alone unless your scans look visibly soft.
Dark enough to read, not so dark the paper greys out
If there's a density or exposure slider, this is the one thing worth a test page. Too light and pencil disappears; too dark and the paper itself turns grey and buries the writing in it. The test is simple: open the scan on your own screen. If you can read it comfortably, so can the marking.
Pen beats pencil, where you can ask for it. Faint pencil is hard for anyone to read — you, a relief teacher, or a scanner. Unless the test needs pencil, asking the class to write in pen is the cheapest improvement available to you.
Before the pile goes in the feeder
- Take the staples out. A stapled corner jams a feeder, tears the page, or pulls two sheets through together. Unstaple, scan, restaple if you're handing the papers back.
- Keep each student's pages together and in order. Splitting works off the names on the pages, so a page that has wandered into the middle of someone else's paper is a paper on the wrong student waiting to happen.
- Don't mix in pages from another test. One pile, one test, one run.
- Check the names are actually written. The name on the paper is what matches it back to your roster. A blank name line means a paper handed to you to assign by hand — avoidable.
- Scan the paper AutoMark printed. The printed layout and the answer key are two views of the same test — that's how the marking knows where each answer sits on the page. Last year's photocopy won't line up, and editing a test after printing means printing the papers again.
If you're photographing instead
Sometimes there's no copier. Photos are supported, and four habits make them work:
- One page per photo. Two pages side by side in one image are much harder to line up with the printed paper.
- Flat and square on. Paper on a table, phone parallel to it, page filling the frame. Photographing at an angle warps the writing.
- Even light, no shadow. Daylight from a window is ideal. Watch that your own head isn't shading the middle of the page, and avoid a single harsh lamp.
- Check one before you do thirty. Photograph a page, look at it at full size, then work through the pile.
What happens to a scan AutoMark can't read
It doesn't guess. Every answer it reads is checked back against the handwriting on the scan, and that check either passes or it doesn't. Answers that pass are marked against your key. Anything that doesn't is put in the review queue with the cropped piece of the real scan beside what was read, so you can see what the student wrote and confirm the reading or override it. You confirm every mark before it's recorded — nothing reaches a student's record until you commit the run.
That's why scan quality shows up as queue length rather than as wrong marks: a poor scan doesn't produce confident nonsense, it produces a longer list of things asking for your eyes. If a run comes back with nearly everything flagged, the pile is usually the culprit, not the class. More on that queue is in the FAQ, and a fuller account of the reading itself is on marking handwritten tests.
Re-scanning one paper
You don't have to redo the class set because one paper went through folded. Rescan just the problem papers and start a run for those; the ones that came back clean stay as they are. If a paper is reported as failed rather than flagged, retry it from the run — that re-reads only that paper.
A paper that landed on the wrong student is fixable too: identification stays changeable right up until you commit, and after commit the correction is recorded against the result rather than quietly replacing it. The step-by-step version of all this is in Troubleshooting.
The checklist
Learn it once and the rest is muscle memory.
- Papers printed from the current version of the test.
- Staples out, pages in order, each student's pages together.
- Names written on the papers.
- Feeder tray squared up, not overfilled.
- Full page, portrait, standard document setting — not fax or line-art.
- Dark enough to read on screen, not so dark the paper greys.
- Scan the lot to one PDF.
- Open the PDF once before uploading. Straight? Sharp? All there?
- On upload, tick that the file holds several students' papers.
- Rescan the odd bad page rather than the whole set.
None of this is specific to us, incidentally — a clean, full-page, straight scan is worth having whichever way you mark. For the run itself, Your first marking run walks through upload, matching and review; student data and privacy covers where the scans go and how long they're kept.
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