Month: April 2020

Like all good things, you sometimes struggle to get past the names you liked at various points in the process, and so they stick even when the design aesthetic has moved on.

You can tell where the name “ladder” came from when you look at the earliest version shown to colleagues for their feedback (red for marker, green for moderator):

Then I started branching out a bit with the design “flair,” but still handling the box geometry calculations by hand. It was clear that novelty would be limited by how long it took to wield the ruler on screen to line things up and encode the coordinates, but things did start to look a little smarter:

Then I realised that these could be made a bit more self documenting in their design, if I could just put boxes where ever I wanted. It would also mean I could take feedback from colleagues without wincing about how long it would take to recalculate where the boxes go. It was like going back to my first interactive educational computer program (on Venn diagrams, written for a primary school science fair on an IBM XT). Some ~30 years later we can do better than that!

I set myself the challenge of being able to parse the SVG output from Inkscape and autogenerate the acroforms for this sample page with three different size boxes that don’t line up with each other. There’s a video of that in action here, and a picture below:

Then I got to work on some more expressive side bars, with an option to include moderation or not. Good user interfaces (even if asynchronous like this) should be self-documenting, ideally. So the vertical lines show that you might indicate the scan was not good, and not do any further marking. Or you might fill in some sub-totals so you can keep track, then tot them up, put them in the Q box, and then tick the ‘page marked’ box. That’s something we can track automagically to make sure every page gets seen.

After marking, our office might select this paper for moderation:

… or you might not .So we can make that more obvious by putting in a visually different sidebar, so we’re not wondering if the moderator left some green boxes blank by accident or not:

Either way it will be checked afterwards in the office. At this point, it is more likely the entries will be keyed in. Then we can extract the marks and make reports. This sort of approach is likely to be faster than the paper process, and can give you more confidence (e.g. run reports that make sure every page got checked).

The paper wasn’t moderated, we don’t want the blue bar hanging off in space, so we move it over to the left – that dynamic X-spacing is another reason for the X in pdf.gradex™.

You can imagine further stages for resolving issues, and re-checking. What we do after that are topic(s) for a further post.

This is a proof-of-concept example hot off the press – the first step in marking is to append a sidebar with marking ladder for subtotals, and a marking flow diagram for the total marks for each question that will be formally captured. Or, if the image is unusable, you can flag it for further attention by your support staff, and they will be alerted when they process your marked scripts. If the image is good, you can TAB from box to box, entering marks, leaving your brainpower to focus on the marking task itself rather than how to get the marks onto the page. If you have a tablet or pen display, you can freehand annotate, and these will be safely flattened into images and preserved by the system without risk of erasing them at future steps.

You can download the actual example here . You can edit and save using Adobe Reader, reload and keep going later. Other editors have variable support. For example, you edit and save in Edge, but not Chrome (it lets you edit but not save). If you’re using chrome, like me, feel free to try out the editing side in the browser, just download the form and use a better editor before doing any work you want to keep!

To support additional steps in the process – e.g. for moderating and checking – additional sidebars can be added with different content, designs, colours, names – examples to follow soon!

With multiple people involved in the marking process, they may have different preferred ways of working. So we can mix and match by flattening any annotations that are made on the script.

The script “freezing” is using ghostscript to render the original image in the PDF so that it bakes in any annotations that the student has made (e.g. erasing mistakes or adding extra work). This way, the marker cannot accidentally undo the electronic editing that the student did to their own work.

It’s even conceivable to mix in printing, marking and then scanning, although it will require some additional steps in the workflow to match up returning scripts with the metadata in the electronic version (QR codes are one possibility here – topic for a future post).