Hi there all,

I ran my first exam with AMC; it was 50% quiz, 50% problems, and I used a separate score sheet. There were 5 variants of the exam, distributed at random to 50 students.

I've hit a few roadblocks, shouted a bit, and suffered at times, but it went well. I'm reporting here on my experience — some of these items may be turned into feature requests, some bug reports, and I'd appreciate your input on it. This list will look like an airing of grievances, but really, I enjoyed my experience overall and I'm looking forward to using AMC again, in a more proficient way. Thanks for a great piece of software.

1. I graded the problems myself on a tablet using xournalpp, and reported the grade on the separate score sheet (an example is attached). Sometimes, the annotation did not get read by AMC, and I had to use the dreadful "convert in.pdf out.pdf" to rasterize the whole file myself. I'm glad I caught this but that wasn't obvious.

2. I was frustrated to have to rescan a handful of papers just because a black speck was here or there and AMC got confused. I would really have liked to be able to tell AMC: Here are the dots.

3. Speaking of, while going through the "reject" pile, it would have been quite helpful to have the filenames given, so I know what to rescan. The input filenames contain the name of the user; 1/24:3 says nothing to me. Similarly, some students forgot to put their name in the name box (the answer sheet); it would have been really useful to get the filename displayed in the script-to-name dialog. Also, when manual-marking the problems, I had the scoresheet opened in AMC and I was opening on the side the script of the student to read their answer; making the connection between the script in AMC and the PDF wasn't easy.

4. About reviewing the automarking; my main concern was that a student darkening of the box wasn't enough (or slightly off) or that they had filled two boxes (usually indicating that they changed their mind). I would have loved to have access to all questions of all copies that were either double-filled or left empty. Going through these would have made point 1. above much more obvious.

5. In a similar fashion, one copy got their scoresheet scanned as the wrong page number; I couldn't see a flag raised somewhere that that student didn't get their scoresheet scanned. In the script-to-name dialog, I had filled out all the matches but it was still displaying "One copy is not associated to a student name". Tracking which one was a pain.

6. When matching names to scripts, I was typing the name of the student, then when it was the only name matched, I had to click on it. Hitting "Enter" rather than clicking would have been much more comfortable.

7. In terms of confidence in the autoscan, I would have loved a dialog in which the autoscanned page number/exam number were displayed next to the script scan, so that I could check it was correctly matched. This goes hand in hand with 2.: Sometimes, AMC makes a mistake, or fails to scan a script for a reason or another, and being able to scan just one script entirely manually or to edit AMC's result would be very useful.

8. When manual marking, I wanted to go through a specific quiz question where I messed up the correct answer, and change the students answers (e.g., if they had put A I'd change it to B). But I couldn't use the "focus on specific question" in a single score sheet situation, because it wasn't zooming on that question, it was bottoming out on the screen (so that the whole bottom half page was shown, and I had no clue which quiz question I was supposed to look at).

9. When exporting the grades to CSV, I'd have like to see the whole grade, not out of 20. Further, a comma is used as the decimal point, which is incorrect in English (the locale should be used to decide the decimal separator).

Sorry for the lengthy list, I know it's bad taste in a forum…

Hope we can solve some of these before my next exam in the Fall!

Cheers,
Michaël