Identifying papers

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

1. Papers named from the start — Plom can produce papers with student names already printed on them. In this case Plom already knows which paper should belong to who and typically very little extra work is needed.

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.

These last two cases require human-intervention, which is where “identifier” comes in.

Running the auto-identifier

1. Open the Manager tool, then “Progress” → “ID progress”.

2. Optionally, adjust the top/bottom crop values, either manually or by clicking “Select interactively”.

3. Click “Recognize digits in IDs” which starts a background job. Click “Refresh” to update the output window.

4. Click “Run LAP Solver”. This currently blocks and might take a few seconds (say 3 seconds for 1000 papers).

5. Click “Refresh Prediction list” to update the table view.

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.

Manually identifying

This is typically quite 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.

For now see https://plomgrading.org/docs/clientUse/identifying.html