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Getting Started with Akindi Paper
Getting Started with Akindi Paper

Everything you need to know to run an in-person paper assessment in Akindi. This guide will help you get you up and running with Akindi!

Christa Plumley avatar
Written by Christa Plumley
Updated over a week ago

Welcome to Akindi!

This guide will walk you through how to run a paper assessment with Akindi in which students will complete the assessment in-person with a paper and writing utensil.

If you wish to create an Online Assessment or use Akindi’s Question Importer, please see the relevant article.

1. Create your Akindi Account

💡 Does your school have the Akindi LMS integration? Most Akindi customer schools have Akindi integrated into their Learning Management System.

Select the LMS that your school uses for specific instructions about accessing Akindi.

If your school does not have the Akindi LMS integration, you can create your Akindi account here.


2. Creating a Course & Uploading a Course Roster

This step will be done automatically when using the LMS Integration. You can skip to step 3.

Before creating an assessment in Akindi, you have to create a course and upload a class roster.

a) To create a course in Akindi:

  • Click 'Create Course' on the left-hand menu.

  • Confirm that you will be creating an ‘Akindi-only course’ - this means that it won’t be connected to an LMS course shell.

  • Enter the Assessment Name, Click ‘Create’.

  • The course will be added to the left-hand menu.

b) To upload a class roster to Akindi:

  • Select the course from the left-hand menu.

  • Click 'Upload Roster'.

  • Click 'Upload Student Roster' and select an Excel (.xlsx) or CSV (.csv) that contains the Student IDs and Student Name. Akindi will automatically recognize the students' names, ID numbers, section numbers, and emails but you can double check this by clicking 'Preview Changes'.

  • Click 'Upload Roster'.

Upload Roster, Select file, Preview Changes, Save Roster.

3. Create Assessment & Customize Bubble Sheets

a) To get started, click the ‘Create Assessment’ button in the upper-right corner.

Create Assessment Button

b) Customize your Bubble Sheets by completing the fields on the left-hand side.

  • Select the course name, enter an assessment name, set the assessment type to ‘paper’. If you wish to run an online assessment, click here.

  • Based on the number of questions and responses on your assessment, select the test sheet layout that best fits your needs. Akindi will ignore any unused questions.

  • Choose to run single version or multi-version assessment.

  • If desired, choose to prefill the bubble sheets with the student names and IDs. This will give you a unique test sheet for each student in your roster.

  • Click ‘Save & Continue.’

Select layout, Prefill student information and sort printed test sheets by Student ID

4. Enter Answer Key

a) Select the correct response(s) for each question in your assessment by clicking on the digital bubble. You can edit your answer key at any point - even after test sheets have been uploaded.

Select correct response for each question.

b) If you are running a multi-version assessment, switch between the different versions using the dropdown menu.

c) Turn on ‘Display Advanced Marking’ to control the weight and grading scheme of each questions. This will allow you to create ‘select all that apply’ questions.

For an in-depth look into the advanced marking options, click here.

💡 Explore the advanced features under the 'More Actions' dropdown menu that may save you time in uploading and editing your answer key.

  • Bulk Changes: Make changes to all the questions at once (like, changing the question weights).

  • Copy & Pasting Answer Key: Enter your answer key by uploading a list of the correct responses.

  • Upload Answer Key: Enter your answer key by uploading the test questions with the correct answer indicated.


5. Printing Test Sheets

a) Click ‘Print Bubble Sheets’ and Akindi will generate a custom Test Sheet PDF.

b) Print the Bubble Sheets using any printer paper, ensuring the four corner squares and QR code are successfully printed on the test sheets.

  • If you chose to prefill the test sheets with student information, you will have a test sheet for each student in your roster. If not, you will have a single blank test sheet.

  • If you are running a multi-version assessment, there will be blank version bubbles which the students will use to indicate their version.

Click 'Print Bubble Sheets' to open PDF of test sheets


6. Administer the Test to Students

On the day of your assessment:

  • Hand out the bubble sheets to the students (just like a Scantron sheet).

  • The students can complete the bubble sheets using any writing utensil - a pencil of any kind, pen of any colour.

💡 Ready to run your assessment? Ensure you have the following things printed and ready for your assessment:

  • Akindi bubble sheets

  • Test questions (this happens outside of Akindi)


7. Scan Completed Bubble Sheets

After the assessment, collect the completed bubble sheets to be scanned.

  • Use any scanner with a document feeder to scan the test sheets into a PDF. You will upload this PDF to Akindi in the next step.

  • Akindi will digitally sort the test sheets by section and version, and even rotate test sheet that were scanned upside-down.

💡 Recommended scanning settings:

  • Up-to 100 test sheets per batch

  • 100 DPI resolution

Because each scanner is slightly different, we are unable to provide specific instructions for your school’s scanner, but here is how most scanners work:

  • Put the stack of completed test sheets on the document feeder on the scanner.

  • Click the ‘Scan’ option on the scanner’s display screen.

  • The scanner will walk you through a few steps including entering an email address to which the PDF will be sent.

  • Click the ‘Scan’ button.

  • Within a few minutes, you will receive an email with a PDF of the scanned test sheets attach. You will upload this PDF to Akindi.


8. Upload Scanned Test Sheets

To upload the PDF of your students' completed bubble sheets to be graded by Akindi:

a) Log into your Akindi account, click ‘Upload Response Sheets’ on your course dashboard.

b) Select the PDF file containing the scanned bubble sheets.

c) Click ‘Upload’.

Once the PDF has been uploaded, Akindi will begin the grading process. It takes about 1-2 seconds per test sheet to be graded.

💡 Once the test sheets have begun to be graded, you can leave or exit the browser tab and Akindi will continue to grade the test sheets in the background.

Upload Sheets, Select File, Upload.

9. Resolving Exceptions

When scanning the test sheets, Akindi will call exceptions if student information is missing or mis-filled, if a student bubbles-in more responses than the answer key contains, or if a page wasn't able to be graded.

Select the one of the presented suggestions to or search the student name by ID of student number in the dropdown menu.

Resolve student ID exception, search student in dropdown menu.

10. Analyzing the Results

Akindi Results are broken down into three separate tabs (Overview, Graphs, Responses) to help you understand two main questions

1) How well the students performed, and

2) How well the test questions performed.

The ‘Overview’ tab features a high-level look at your assessment.

The 'Overview' displays

  • Average, highest, and lowest grade

  • Easiest and hardest question

  • Discriminatory score

  • Best constructed question, questions which could be improved

Overview tab

The ‘Graphs’ tab contains the item analysis of all your questions.

  • Students Marks

  • Grade Distribution

  • Answer Breakdown

  • Point Biserial

Answer Breakdown

The ‘Responses’ tab is the full spreadsheet view of all the students and their individual grades.

'Responses' Tab


11. Exporting the Test Results

a) To Send the grades to your LMS Gradebook:

  • Click the ‘Send Grades to LMS’ button.

  • Select the desired grade item you wish to send the grades to.

  • Click ‘Export’

Send grades to LMS

b) There are a number of other ways to export the results using the 'Actions' dropdown menu.

  • Download CSV File: Spreadsheet containing all students' grades.

  • Download question breakdown CSV: Spreadsheet containing question item analysis.

  • Email students their grades: Sends each student a secure link to access their individual student report.

  • Download corrected test sheets: A PDF containing each students corrected test sheet.

'Actions' dropdown menu

Questions? Feedback?

We are are here to help! Feel free to search our Help Center or reach out to via our live in-app chat.

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