Essential Applications

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.

• Answers along long edge
• Answers along short edge, version 1
• Answers along short edge, version 2

[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 exam
  This will make a file exam.ms exam.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.
  In addition to the 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.
  Note you can also send the pbm file to students if a question comes up about the scanning, though it might be better to use gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dSAFER -o scanN%03d.pdf scanN.pdf and send the pdf file.
• It is important that each line in the .ms file have the student's ID, so if you scanned exams without IDs, edit the file to fill in the ID now.
  [Alternately, you might have filled in the ID on the answer sheet, but to do that you have to convert each digit of the student's ID to binary coded decimal, eg. 9 is ● ○ ○ ●, 4 is ○ ● ○ ○, 1 is ○ ○ ○ ●.]
• Then execute
  insertnames exam homestud (or insertnames -num exam homestud for an exam with numerical questions)
  You need to have the homestud file in the current directory.
• Then execute
  cat exam.k exam.oktail > exam.ok
  This gives you the exam.ok file you need as input to grad.