Identifying papers

At some point the Plom system needs to know which paper belongs to which student. This can be done in several ways:

  1. Prenamed papers: Plom can produce papers with student names and IDs already printed on them.

  2. Automated ID reading — When tests are producing using Plom’s ID Template, the system can use 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.

All these eventually require verification by a human.

Running the auto-identifier

This will only work if your assessment uses our idBox template because the code first looks for the outer bold rectangle and then tries to locate the 8 digits of the student number, based on known locations inside that larger box.

To run the auto-identifier, locate it under “ID Progress” in the Plom web interface.

Note that by default a human will still need to confirm the machine-read predictions.

Tip

You can re-run the ID predictor at anytime, such as after confirming some of the IDs manually.

Caution

You should manually and carefully check the results (the Identifier client will show you these by default) because it does make mistakes, especially when there are additional names available in your classlist who did not write the test.

Confirming and/or manually identifying

This is currently done using the desktop client. Users who perform identifying must be added to the “identifier” group, including “manager” users.

Identifying is typically quick compared to marking and you will not need to assign much person-time. Since it does not require any heavy thinking it can be a good task for:

  • the instructor-in-charge who is regularly interrupted by questions about papers,

  • a (reliable) marker who finishes their other tasks early, or

  • the scanner once they have finished scanning and uploading papers.

What to do if an ID page looks blank or is missing information?

If there is insufficient information on the page, you can click View whole paper: perhaps the ID can be found on another page, or maybe the entire paper is blank (i.e., unused). Clicking Blank page... will ask you to confirm the situation.

I made a mistake identifying: how can I revert an ID?

Login to the web interface as either a “manager” or “identifier” account. Go to “Identifying Progress” and click on clear by the paper you wish to reset.

On legacy servers, The UnID operation is exposed in the beta Manager Tool -> ID Progress tab.

What is the purpose of confirming prenamed papers?

  1. Students might sit at the wrong seat, scratch out the name and write their own.

  2. Despite your best efforts in careful paper handling, you might accidentally scan a blank paper with Manji’s name and ID prenamed on the front. In the worst case, that could result in you (incorrectly) assigning a grade of zero to Manji, instead of recording that they Did Not Write.

All of these things and more have happened to us; its worth the time to check.

A student wrote a different paper than what was prenamed for them

For example suppose Isla’s name was prenamed on paper 0120 but they wrote blank paper 1280 instead. Plom’s “prenaming” is a “prediction” because of exactly this situation. Simply ID 1280 as normal. (If 0120 was also scanned and is blank, and unsigned, then the Identifier interface will have you confirm).