Troubleshooting

Most problems in AutoMark come from the scan rather than the marking. Here are the ones teachers hit most, and what to do about each.

A lot of answers came back flagged

AutoMark flags an answer whenever the reading doesn’t pass its check against the handwriting. A whole batch landing in the review queue usually points at the scan, not the students.

Check the scan first:

• Is the page sharp? Rescan anything blurred, skewed more than slightly, or photographed at an angle. A flatbed or sheet-feed scan beats a photo.
• Is the whole page there? Trimmed edges cut off answer boxes. Scan the full A4 page, borders included.
• Is it dark enough to read, but not so dark the paper greys out? Faint pencil is hard for anyone to read. Ask students to write in pen where you can.
• One page per page. Two pages photographed side by side in a single image are harder to line up with the printed paper.

Rescan the problem papers and start a new run for those; you don’t need to redo the ones that came back clean.

A whole class set came in as one paper

A PDF that holds several students’ papers stacked together needs to be declared as such when you upload it: tick the option saying the file holds several students’ papers, and AutoMark splits it into one paper per student using the names on the pages. Without that tick, the file is treated as a single long paper.

Remove the upload, tick the box, and add it again.

A paper is matched to the wrong student

AutoMark matches papers to your class roster by the name written on the paper, so a misread or unusual spelling can land a paper on the wrong record.

Fix it before you commit: open the paper, reassign it to the correct student, and carry on. Identification stays changeable right up until you commit the run — that is exactly what the step before commit is for.

If you’ve already committed, you can still correct it. The correction is recorded against the result rather than quietly replacing it, so the student’s record shows what changed.

Two students have the same name

Give them names on the roster that tell them apart — a surname initial is usually enough. AutoMark matches what’s written on the paper against the roster, so if the roster can’t distinguish them, neither can the matching. Papers that can’t be matched confidently are handed to you to assign.

Handwriting was read as the wrong thing

Open the item in the review queue: the cropped scan sits beside the reading, so you can see what the student actually wrote. If the reading is wrong, override it and enter the mark yourself. The override is what gets recorded.

If a particular question is misread across many papers, it’s often the answer box: a bigger box, a ruled line, or a little more space between questions makes a noticeable difference on the next test.

An upload looks stuck

Marking a batch takes a few minutes — bigger batches take longer, and the page updates as papers finish. If it hasn’t moved for a long while:

1. Refresh the page. Progress is stored server-side, so nothing is lost by reloading, and the run picks up where it actually is.
2. Check the file you uploaded is a PDF that opens normally on your own computer. A partly-written or corrupted export from the copier will fail to process.
3. If a paper is reported as failed, retry it from the run. Retrying re-reads just that paper.

If it’s still stuck after that, send us a bug report from inside the app using the report button — it comes through with enough context for us to find the run.

A test needs changing after it’s been marked

Editing a test that’s already been used creates a new version of it. Results that were already marked keep the version they were marked against, so your earlier runs stay exactly as you left them. Print fresh papers from the new version before you use it with a class.

Something else

Use the report button inside the app, or email support@automarkhq.com. Tell us what you were doing and what you expected — that’s usually enough for us to reproduce it. Please leave student names out of the message.