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Processing and uploading scans

At this point we assume that you have printed that papers, fed them to your students (or the other way around), and collected the completed tests.

Scanning papers

To get the students’ work into Plom we have to get the physical papers scanned. The precise details of how you do this will depend on the scanning hardware that is available. We do strongly recommend that you

  • scan in colour,
  • use DPI at least 200,
  • do a trial run of a few papers to check that the scans are easy to read and files are not huge.

Further

  • If you are not doing it yourself, then delegate to someone trustworthy. Scanning is a key task.
  • Staple removal is probably the slowest part of scanning. Spend a little time working out whether you should use scissors, a guillotine, or staple-remover.
  • Use good “paper hygiene”:
    • Sort papers into test-number order before scanning, and keep them in order.
    • Keep papers in sensible and physically manageable bundles, before, during and after scanning.
    • Have a good physical flow of papers from pre-scan to post-scan, so that each paper is scanned exactly once.
    • Give your scan-files clear names like mABCmt1-s1-b2.pdf (mathematics ABC, section 1, bundle 2), rather than the easy ambiguous ones like stuff-3.pdf

Make sure the server is running.

Before we can upload anything the server must be running. Follow these instructions, and make sure that the “scanner” user is created. That user will have authority to upload scans. Once the server is running the “scanner” can upload PDFs so that our marking team can get to work.

Uploading to the server

Notice that the processing and uploading of scans need not be done on the same computer as the original PDF production. Indeed, Plom has been set up so that scanning can be delegated to the “scanner” user who may be running on a different computer entirely.

Make a working directory

First of all we should decide on a working directory for the scanning and upload process. An easy choice to make a subdirectory upload where we built our PDFs. Move into this directory and copy one of the scan PDFs here; we’ll assume we are working on the scans from a single bundle of papers called mABCmt1-s1-b2.pdf. If you run plom-scan by itself, then it will display a simple description of the workflow required and of the sub-commands we need.

Process a PDF into page-images

Since the scan PDF consists of images of many pages, we need to separate the scan PDF into distinct page-images. This is done using plom-scan process mABCmt1-s1-b2.pdf. This will result in quite a lot of output, which you can perhaps skim. There will be a new bundles/mABCmt1-s1-b2.pdf/ subdirectory containing the extracted images and various other things.

During processing, Plom reads the QR-codes from each page-image to determine which test-page it corresponds to. Various sanity checks are done and page orientation adjusted.

The page-images fall into several categories: “known” (technically “TestPages”), “unknown” and “collision”. You may see notes or warnings about the latter two during processing.

Upload the known pages

The “known”s are page images which contained mostly valid QR-codes which passed various sanity checks. If the total number of collisions and unknowns is fairly low, then the known images are ready to upload to the server:

$ plom-scan upload mABCmt1-s1-b2.pdf
Upload images to server
Upload 0006,06,2 = t0006p06v2.mABCmt1-s1-b2-36.jpg to server
Upload 0008,03,1 = t0008p03v1.mABCmt1-s1-b2-45.jpg to server
Upload 0005,05,1 = t0005p05v1.mABCmt1-s1-b2-29.png to server
...

Your original PDF file should have now moved to a archivedPDFs subdirectory.

Upload the unknowns

“Unknown”s are not usually a cause for concern; they typically occur for one of two reasons:

  • the page does not contain qr-codes because it is an extra-page used by a student. We encourage you to not give students completely blank paper since you will need to be able to identify which test and question that extra page belongs to. We have supplied a simple two-sided template for extra pages.

  • the qr-codes on the page were not legible for some reason. Generally this is due to some scanning issue such as a page being folded over, or skewed. Occasionally it is because someone wrote on the qr-code. In our experience this does not happen very often.

Before you upload the unknowns, it might be a good idea to take a quick look at them in bundles/mABCmt1-s1-b2.pdf/unknownPages. If its a small percentage of the total files in your bundle or can be explained by the above situations, you can proceed to uploading, but note “Unknowns” will need to be handled manually (later after uploading, with the plom-manager tool).

On the other hand, if something has systematically gone wrong, such as all pages are blank or very few QR-codes have been read, then you’ll likely want to check your scanning.

Upload collisions

“Collisions” are generally, but not always, a cause for concern. They indicate that the Plom system has two page-images both claiming to be the same test-page. We strongly recommend that you look at the images in the bundles/mABCmt1-s1-b2.pdf/collidingPages subdirectory before uploading them.

There are a few ways in which “collisions” might occur:

  • a given test was printed and used more than once — this is very bad and might be difficult to correct.
  • a given test was scanned twice — in large quantities, this will be annoying, and might indicate poor “paper hygiene”
  • a given test-page was rescanned to replace an existing, but poor quality, scan in the system — this is okay.

In the first two cases, perhaps you do not want to upload these files. But images falling into the last case should definitely be uploaded: later the plom-manager tool can be used to select which one you want to keep. To upload the “collisions” run plom-scan upload mABCmt1-s1-b2.pdf --collisions.

Getting a status report

It is sometimes helpful to check what papers have and have not been uploaded. It is also very helpful to see if any papers have been partially uploaded. To get such a status-summary, run plom-scan.py status. You will get a simple report such as

Test papers unused: [12–20]
Scanned tests in the system:
    2: testPages [1-6] hwPages []
    3: testPages [1-6] hwPages []
    4: testPages [1-6] hwPages []
    5: testPages [1-6] hwPages []
    6: testPages [1-6] hwPages []
    7: testPages [1-6] hwPages []
    8: testPages [1-6] hwPages []
    9: testPages [1-6] hwPages []
    10: testPages [1-6] hwPages []
    11: testPages [1-6] hwPages []
Number of scanned tests in the system: 10
Incomplete scans - listed with their missing pages:
    1: t[6] h[]

Something went wrong

The scanning workflow is very much in flux and this documentation might lag behind. When in doubt, check the plom-scan --help and plom-scan <cmd> --help, and please file issues about specific incorrect documentation.

Note currently its not easy to wipe a bundle and start again, see for example Issue #1189.