Printing and scanning Administered assessments

Crowdmark is 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 an Administered assessment template for more information. You can also find a complete list of tips and tricks for Administered assessments here.

Printing assessments

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. If scanned images are uploaded a second time, the new images will replace the old images. Existing grading and annotation is not affected by uploading new scans

 

Crowdmark also accepts scanned images in JPEG format but our preferred format is multi-page PDF.

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.