Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale

Added by shreikant kv over 9 years ago

On earlier occasions, I had indicated persistent problems with "Update Marking Scale" Module of "Marking".

I can now give a good example of the same.

I am using AMC ver 1.2.1 (svn:1403).

I have a simple test (AMC project) with 153 students. Each question paper has about 13 questions with separate bubble
sheet. Each students gets 4 pages in total. The 612 pages of DOC-sujet.pdf are created in about 10 minutes
on my 4 year old machine. But the Update Marking Scale did not complete even after 1 hour!

I have included my entire latex files and required files in my attached zip. If any of you is testing this,
+ kindly create a new project, pick up my "source.tex" as the .tex file --> BUT do not forget to dump
"numofstuds.tex" in the same directory as "source.tex" AND the folder "include" in the same said directory.+

I have included one bubble sheet in the "scans" subfolder of the zipped folder I have attached. Kindly
use this if you are going for automatic data capture.

I have included a sample DOC-sujet.pdf of 4 pages -- in case some one likes the format or template, they can use it
freely. I have moved most of the issues to a style file "kuppum.sty" that I have put in the "include" subfolder.

Summary: main tex file: "source.tex"
Requires: "numofstuds.tex" in the same folder
Requires: "include" subfolder containing the style file "kuppum.sty" and list of students "students.csv"
and a file "normal.csv" for generating some table.

My only guess for this mess in "Update Marking Scale": I am using "datatool" to read the students.csv file and
generating each question paper one at a time. You can search for the relevant part of the latex code in "kuppum.sty".

In any case something is WRONG when I can generate the DOC-sujet.pdf etc in 10 minutes but can't get the marking
done in 1 hour!!!


Replies (12)

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by shreikant kv over 9 years ago

It took 2.5 hours to update the marking scale. So the question is not "failed"
but one of "delayed" updating of marking scale.

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by Alexis Bienvenüe over 9 years ago

I tried with your source file and current development version of AMC:
  • I removed the \AMCcodeBoxSep line, with has been dropped in the new style version, even if the doc still mention it — this has to be corrected.
  • With this new style version, the layout has been changed a little, so automatic data capture is not correct with your scan.
    With my computer, updating marking scale is faster than generating documents (~2 min).

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by shreikant kv over 9 years ago

Thank you for the same! I shall keep this in mind for future projects.

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by Alexis Bienvenüe over 9 years ago

To extract the marking scale from the source file, AMC runs LaTeX once and reads some log file. To build the documents, AMC runs LaTeX one or more times (more than once if your documents needs re-run due to labels, or if you asked for the solution or catalog document). So updating the marking scale should be faster that generating documents, and your situation seems very strange to me. Is it the same for a moderate amount of copies from the same source file? If so, can you update the marking scale in debugging mode, and join the log file?

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by Roberto González over 9 years ago

Dear Shreikant and Alexis:

This issue makes me remember this: AMC performance on postcorrection

I seems that, under some specific scenarios, ACM becomes slow when the marks scale is updated. The problem here is to identify exactly what are the conditions that make AMC to become slow when this task is carried on. If I can help with testing or something else, please let me know and I'll see how I can colaborate with this.

Regards.

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by Alexis Bienvenüe over 9 years ago

You are right: I would like to reproduce the problem, so that I can investigate and (I hope) fix it. Unfortunately, untill now I could not. so I am a little puzzled.

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by shreikant kv over 9 years ago

Commenting out the lines:

%\AMCcodeHspace=.5em
%\AMCcodeVspace=.2em
%\AMCcodeBoxSep=.1em

fixed the problem. Now, even update documents is much faster ( five times faster) while
Update Marking Scale is more than a 100 times faster.

Thanks to Alexis for pointing this out.

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by Alexis Bienvenüe over 9 years ago

Did you also update AMC? I think commenting the last line is necessary to use development version of AMC, but the reason why all is faster now is that you updated AMC, not that you commented out some of these lines. The opposite would be very weird to me.

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by shreikant kv over 9 years ago

No, Alexis. I could not update AMC. I am still with 1.2.1 (svn 1403).
Yes, commenting these lines worked like magic.

(I have Ubuntu 12.04 -- tried to update AMC to development version-- but
got some broken packages. Couldn't quickly fix the problem).

Also, Alexis, when I run from command line with a debug file,
where is the log file placed? Thanks.

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by Alexis Bienvenüe over 9 years ago

So this is very strange!

when I run from command line with a debug file, where is the log file placed?

You can specify the file to add log to with --debug file.log

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by shreikant kv over 8 years ago

I guess I have found the problem. When I had version x of AMC, I could not
run input latex files as the "automultiplechoice.sty" was not found. (Due
to nature of tex installation). I moved the version x latex style file
to ~/texmf/tex/latex".

After a while I upgraded AMC to version y. But now owing to nature of tex
installation, AMC Version-y was using latex style file Version-x.

I do not know whether "Update Documents" and "Extract Marking Scheme" match the
version of AMC with the latex style file: and if not it might be worth it to
put this check.

No wonder this problem persisted for months and years.....

RE: Failed or Delayed : Update Marking Scale - Added by Alexis Bienvenüe over 8 years ago

I do not know whether "Update Documents" and "Extract Marking Scheme" match the
version of AMC with the latex style file: and if not it might be worth it to
put this check.

Not yet. I agree this should be a good thing. Can you add a feature request?

(1-12/12)