Printing and scanning Administered assessments

The Crowdmark booklet workflows are currently designed for flexible page sizes (including 8.5 x 11, legal, A4, portrait or landscape format), printed double or single-sided and stapled at the upper left corner. See Creating a Crowdmark booklet template for more information. You can also find a complete list of tips and tricks for QR coded assessments here.

Ready to grade assessments have no requirements for print formatting, but they do have specific needs when scanning. Follow the instructions below for best practices.

Printing QR coded Crowdmark booklets

When creating a QR coded assessment, Crowdmark recommends printing double-sided booklets to avoid students writing on pages with no QR codes. If using stapled booklets, we also recommend using ‘subset stapling’ when available. This commonly available printer/copier feature will place a staple after a pre-defined amount of pages, creating stapled booklets for you.

If you’re not sure your printer has a subset stapling setting available, we suggest checking in with the local machine administrator, manufacturer tech support, or looking up the printer model online.

Please make sure to double check that you are printing on the same sized paper as your template (for example: If you create a template in A4 and print in 8.5 x 11, it will cause errors when scanning.

Scanning assessments

When scanning completed booklets, there are some optimal settings to use:

1. Greyscale or color. At this time Crowdmark is not fully compatible with black and white images, and scanning in black and white will lead to QR code issues on upload.
2. 200 DPI scanning resolution in multi-page PDF format. This should result in images with dimensions 1700×2200 pixels.
3. It is recommended to enable a “darker” setting if your scanner allows it. This helps light pencil marks to be seen more clearly.
4. If you are using multiple choice bubble sheets, ensure that your scanner makes any extra space around the scan white. If the area where the staples were cut off is scanned in black it may interfere with the multiple choice autograder.
5. Setting your scanner to auto-detect page borders will be helpful to avoid extra white space around the page and ensure proper grahpical positioning.
6. Each file must be under 500 MB in size. It is not necessary to upload a single PDF file containing all the assessment images. The uploading can be done in batches, we recommend under 2000 scanned pages per batch. 

 

Considerations for QR-coded booklets:

• Crowdmark reads QR code data on the assessment pages to route the scanned images to the right place for grading. It is important that the QR codes and other page-positioning graphics are not cut off or obscured in the printing and scanning steps, and that they are properly aligned on the scanned file.
• If there are pages with no QR codes included in the scans, they will not be uploaded to the assessment, and will not be gradeable in Crowdmark. To add gradeable, QR-coded scratch pages for your students to use, include blank pages in your assessment template.
• Issues with scan quality can be corrected by scanning and uploading uploaded a second time. In QR coded booklets, the images will simply replace the previous uploaded ones by matching QR codes. Existing grading will not be affected by replacing the images.

 

Considerations for non-QR-coded and Ready to grade assessments:

• Booklets must be scanned with all pages together and ideally in order. Crowdmark’s booklet detection is based on your template, and if booklet pages are mixed up Crowdmark has no way of organizing them. If necessary, pages can be manually re-ordered within a booklet in the Review scans interface.
• Unlike the QR coded workflow, uploading the same scans more than once will result in new booklets being created. Scans from different assessments will not be rerouted. If there’s an issue with scan quality, individual pages can be replaced from the Review scans page. You can also delete a booklet or batch and replace it with a new upload. To preserve grading integrity, you will not be able to move or delete a page with evaluations, but you can replace the individual image.
• Pages outside of the template such as scratch work can be included with the upload. They will automatically be appended to the previous booklet for grading. Extra pages can be dragged and dropped between booklets when reviewing scans, however they cannot be moved between batches. This means extra pages need to be included with the batch scan, or uploaded individually to the appropriate booklet after scanning. See uploading completed assessments for more details
• Page orientation is not corrected on upload, so we recommend making sure pages are oriented correctly on scanning.