Welcome to Akindi!
This guide will walk you through how to run a paper assessment with Akindi Classic in which you wish to manage your own question content. Students will complete the assessment in-person with a paper and writing utensil.
If you wish Akindi to handle automatic question scrambling, or to create an Online Assessment or use Akindi’s Question Importer, please see the relevant article.
1. Launch Akindi from Blackboard
a) Log in to Blackboard and select your desired course.
b) Go to 'Content'. Click the 'Tools' dropdown menu, click 'More Tools' and select 'Akindi'.
💡 Using Blackboard Ultra? Follow this guide to enable Akindi into your course shell.
c) Set the Link Name to 'Akindi' and click 'Submit'.
d) Click the 'Akindi' link, then select 'Launch Assessment'.
Akindi will open in a new browser tab and will automatically create your course and synchronized your class roster from Canvas.
2. Create Assessment & Customize Bubble Sheets
a) To get started, click the ‘Create Assessment’ button in the upper-right corner.
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.’
3. 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.
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.
4. 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.
5. 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)
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Resolving Exceptions
When scanning the test sheets, exceptions are called when bubble sheet information is missing, mis-read, or unclear.
You can find these exceptions under the "Review & Fix" tab once the upload has been completed. To learn more about resolving Review & Fix exceptions, check out this article.
9. Analyzing the Results
Akindi Results are broken down into three separate tabs:
Overview
Graphs
Responses
Each tab helps you understand two main questions:
1) How well the students performed, and
2) How well the test questions performed.
The Overview Tab
The ‘Overview’ tab gives you a snapshot of your assessment’s overall performance. Think of it as your “at-a-glance” dashboard for results.
What it shows:
Average Results: The mean score across all students responses. This can be sorted by the hardest and easiest questions.
Discriminatory Score: The discriminatory score shows the relationship between students correctly answering each question and their overall performance on the assessment. This can be sorted by the most effective and least effective questions.
To learn more about the Discriminatory Score and how it is calculated, check out this article.
Score Distribution: For each question, a bar chart shows the % of student responses for each answer combination
💡 Still manually cross referencing question content with Akindi analytics? Try uploading your question content into Akindi so that all analytics and results are shown along side your content. Check out this article.
The Graphs Tab
The ‘Graphs’ tab contains the item analysis of all your questions, making it easy to spot patterns and trends at a glance.
What it shows:
Students Marks: Quickly compare performance across your class, and identify any outliers in student performance
Grade Distribution: See how many students fell into each grade band or score range
Answer Breakdown: Identify questions that were misunderstood or too difficult.
Point Biserial: Review questions with negative or low values to decide whether they should be revised or removed from future assessments.
The Responses Tab
The ‘Responses’ tab is the full spreadsheet view of all the students and their individual grades.
What it shows:
Individual Student Recorded Responses: The answers Akindi detected for each question, highlighted alongside the correct answer key.
Student Score Summary: The student’s total marks, percentage, and number of correct/incorrect responses.
💡 The response chart is editable! You can edit student responses and your answer key directly in this chart. Double click on the cell you want to edit to change the student response or answer key.
💡 Looking to add marks from a hand graded, non-multiple choice portion of the assessment? Learn how to enter hand-graded marks into Akindi.
12. Exporting Text Results
a) To Send the grades to your Blackboard Gradebook:
Click the ‘Send Grades to Blackboard’ button.
Select the desired grade item you wish to send the grades to.
Click ‘Send"
b) There are a number of other ways to export the results using the 'Actions' dropdown menu.
Download Responses CSV: 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 Student Reports: A PDF containing each students corrected test sheet.
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.