The answer forms, whether on a commercial mark-sense-form answer sheet or
on the cover of the exam, need to be scanned to produce a file suitable
for submission to the grading program grad.
The procedures are different for the two options.
Using Mark Sense Forms
The Department stockroom stocks two kinds of answer forms, one having only
multiple (5) choice questions, up to 200 questions, and the other having up
to 15 numerical answer questions and up to 30 multiple (5) choice questions.
If you have both numerical answer and multiple choice questions, the numerical
ones will be numbered starting with 1, and come first, and the multiple
choice questions will come after that, starting with number 16. You must
use the correct form. The scanning machine is in room 383 in Serin East.
Read these general instructions and
these specific ones. The output will be a file on the Sun which you
should name in the form myexam.ms.
Then you need to run grfix, following
these instructions. This should wind up producing
the myexam.ok file, which will be input
to grad.
Using the Cover Sheet for Answers
If you have prepared your exam to put the answer forms on the cover sheet,
as detailed here, you used a answer form
such as mc37.ps which came along with
a data file mc37.dat. You will need the
latter file and the file homestud made
when you produced the exams following
the instructions in Making Exam Cover Sheets
with Answer Forms. You also need to be able to execute the programs
scanExam and
insertnames, which are available on the
Physics servers or for linux computers. You may possibly need
flipitcw, flipitccw, or
flipit180, which are also on those machines.
The cover sheets need to be brought in a pile, all facing up and aligned, to the copy room 231. They should be divided into piles of roughly 15-20 sheets and the stapled corners chopped off with the Premier cutter, losing less that 1 1/2 inches on either edge. These should be recombined into groups of 40-70 sheets. Each group is then scanned on one of the Ricoh machines with email sent to the instructor.
If the printer/scanning machine is showing the papercut screen, press the house icon to bring up a sharescan button, and press that. You will scan to email, but first follow the he detailed instructions for scanning, checking the scanner settings. These depend on the cover sheet design, in particular if the answer form is along the long edge (as in two-column mode) or the short edge of the page. Read the appropriate instructions and then return here.
[Note: We have been having some troubles with version 1, so please report your experience with either of the two short edge versions]
At this point, after returning from the long or short edge instructions,
you will have a file for each student listed in the file
inputlist .
scanExam mc37
inputlist examexam.ms
with one line (three lines for numerical question exams) for each
student. Of course you need to change mc37 to whatever answer
form you used, without the .ps.
You need to have
the .dat file for your answer form in
the current directory.
You can use any basename you like instead of
exam.exam.ms file,
this will make exam.xref and possibly
examErrors. The first gives a cross
reference from student ID to the name of the
scan*flip.pbm file, which you can
view with gthumb or some other
pbm viewer, and the second tells you
which answer sheets had problems. You can edit the
.ms file before proceeding.
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dSAFER -o scanN%03d.pdf scanN.pdf
and send the pdf file.
.ms file have the student's ID,
so if you scanned exams without IDs, edit the file to fill in the
ID now. insertnames exam homestud
(or insertnames -num exam homestud
for an exam with numerical questions) homestud file
in the current directory.
cat exam.k exam.oktail > exam.okexam.ok
file you need as input to grad.