The marking process

Once some of your papers have been scanned and uploaded, you can get your marking team to start working.

Tip

You do not need to wait until all papers are processed before starting.

Ready to mark

Your markers will all need to download the client: Getting started with the Plom Client.

They can then begin the process of annotating papers, leaving useful feedback and assigning marks (grades). It is by far the most important part of the assessment, and will consume the vast majority of your available person-time. Individual markers can be assigned to a specific version of a specific question.

Marking party!

Some people recommend that your term work at least initially in the same physical location. Of course, you can use Plom to do your marking just about anywhere, but it has been observed that marking goes much faster and is more consistent when you are all in the same location. Once your marking scheme has been exposed to real student responses and your team has worked out the kinks, physical proximity is less important.

Tracking progress

You can use manager accounts to keep an eye on progress. If you are using the older legacy server, see Managing a legacy Plom server.

Tagging tasks

Each task can be tagged with essentially arbitrary short text tags, which are used to communicate within the grading team (they are not by default shown to students).

Tagging it to a particular user will mean that Plom is more likely to assign the task to that user.

Reassigning and reverting tasks

You can find tasks under the “Progress” section of your Plom admin site. There you can “reset” (revert all annotations made to a task) a task. You can also assign it to another user, keeping existing annotations intact.

Caution

Reassigning tasks is still work-in-progress.

Quotas

Sometimes you may wish to temporarily limit the numbers of questions a user can mark. You can do this by setting a per-user quota in the User Management part of the Plom admin site. After a marker reaches their quota, they will not be allowed to mark additional papers, until you remove or increase their quota limit.

Examples of this feature include:

  1. You are working with novice graders and want to review their marking and/or meet with them after they have graded (say) 20 tasks.

  2. You’re working with a team and want everyone to mark 10 tasks, then have a meeting to settle on a common set of rubrics.

  3. You have 300 tasks that need grading and want to want to ensure that everyone does their share.