Identifying papers

At some point the Plom system needs to know which paper belongs to which student and this can be done in three ways.

1. Papers named from the start — Plom can produce papers with student names already printed on them. In this case Plom already knows which paper belongs to who and so there is no extra work needed.

2. ID reading — When tests are producing using Plom’s ID template, the system can use a little machine learning to read the digits from the student-ID boxes and match against the classlist. In practice these appear to be over 95% accurate, but are not infallible.

3. Manual association — The simplest method is for a human to just read the ID from the page and enter it into the system.

These last two cases require human-intervention, which is where “identifier” comes in.

Identifying

Run the client and click Identify. After a moment, this window will appear displaying the ID-pages of a paper.

On a real test the information would be handwritten

Note that you can zoom in on the image using left-click, and then zoom out using right-click or shift-click. You can then start typing either the name or ID into the appropriate box on the top-left, and it will auto-complete (from the data in the classlist). Pressing enter will bring up a small confirmation window and then move you to the next unidentified paper.

Notice that if there is insufficient information on the page, the marker can click the View whole button which will bring up the entire paper in a separate window. Hopefully then the ID can be found on another page. Otherwise, clicking the Blank page button will bring up the following

asking the marker to confirm which of these options it is.

If ID-predictions are present, then the window will be slightly different with the prediction displayed at the top:

If the prediction is correct the marker can simply click the accept prediction button and the next unidentified paper will be displayed.

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