The review queue

After a marking run, the answers AutoMark verified and matched against your key are marked automatically. The review queue holds the rest: every answer it wasn’t willing to mark without you. Working the queue is a glance and a decision per card — anything AutoMark wasn’t sure of came to you first, and nothing is recorded until you commit the run.

What lands in your queue

AutoMark checks each reading it makes against the handwriting on the scan. That check either passes or it doesn’t — there’s no in-between — and an answer is flagged for you when:

• AutoMark couldn’t verify its reading of the answer;
• the answer it read doesn’t match your key — every answer marked wrong is shown to you before anything is recorded;
• it could only award part of the marks, or couldn’t make the answer out at all;
• a written answer isn’t one your key accepts.

A flag isn’t a verdict. It means AutoMark would rather ask you than guess, and each card says why it’s asking — Check read means the reading itself needs your eyes; Incorrect means the reading didn’t match your key.

Reading a card

Each card puts one decision in one place: the crop of the student’s actual paper, what AutoMark read it as, your answer key, and whose paper it is. Press E to enlarge the crop — you can confirm or override from the enlarged view too.

One habit worth forming: the crop is the truth. “Read as” is AutoMark’s reading of the ink, and if the reading and the ink disagree, the ink wins — override and move on. That’s what the crop is there for.

Three ways to resolve an answer

• Confirm (C) — the reading and the mark are right. Take them and move to the next card.
• Override (O) — set the mark yourself. Overriding asks for a reason: type one — say, no units with a mark taken off — and it’s saved for that question, so the next time you make the same call it’s a single keystroke. You can also adjust the marks without a reason. A reason keeps your marking consistent across the class and records why a mark changed.
• Also correct (A) — the student’s written answer is fair, but your key didn’t list it. This adds it to the key and re-marks everyone in the run against it, so that answer won’t be marked wrong again for anyone in the run.

Changed your mind after resolving? A resolved card can be changed, or sent back to the queue, any time before you commit.

When several students write the same thing

If the same flagged answer turns up on more than one paper, the queue folds those papers into a single card: every student’s crop side by side, and one decision that applies to all of them. The header keeps count both ways — how many answers need a check, and how few decisions that actually is.

You’re still deciding on evidence, not on trust: each crop is on the card, and if one student’s answer deserves its own look, Review separately pulls it out into its own card.

Finishing the run

Once you’ve worked through the queue, two buttons finish the job:

• Confirm all machine-unsure accepts every remaining flagged reading at once — useful when you’ve eyeballed the queue and the readings are all sound.
• Commit results writes the marks to your students’ records. It stays locked until every paper has finished marking and every flagged answer is resolved, so a half-checked run can’t be recorded by accident.

If a run comes back with nothing flagged, you’ll see All marked — nothing to check and can commit straight away. Either way, nothing reaches a student’s record until you commit — the whole run stays a draft, and every mark in it stays yours to change, until then. The commit step itself is covered in Your first marking run.

Keyboard first

The queue is built to be worked without the mouse: C confirm, O override, A also correct, ↑/↓ to move between cards, E to enlarge the scan. The active card follows you down the page as you go.

If far more landed in your queue than you expected, AutoMark probably found the scan hard to read — see Troubleshooting for what helps it read a scan well.