Demonstration system
The Plom system comes with a simple built-in demonstration so that you can
- test that you have all the required packages installed on your system,
- try out the
plom-clientfor identifying and marking papers, and - try out the
plom-managerto oversee the marking process.
Follow these steps
1. Install Plom
First follow these instructions to pip-install the Plom system.
2. Make a directory
Create a directory in which your demonstration system will live and move into that directory. The demonstration system will require a few tens of megabytes of disc space. Additionally we recommend that you do not use a networked drive since the extra lag can cause problems.
3. Run plom-demo
Once you are inside a suitable directory, run plom-demo.
That’s it.
A little more detail of what it is doing
The command runs through the standard workflow. It runs plom-create using Plom’s inbuilt template tests, test specification, and fake classlist to construct a set of PDFs. It diverts from the standard workflow by running a very simple “student simulator”. This paints some simple mock-responses onto the generated tests. After the mock-responses are done, plom-demo sets up the server and launches it on localhost’s default port. Once the server is up, the PDFs with their student-responses can be processed and uploaded by plom-scan.
Warning the default user list does not have secure passwords and should never be used on a real test. It is for demo use only. Note that you can stop plom-demo using ctrl-c, and then follow these instructions to edit the userlist and restart the server.
4. Try out the client
At this point the server is ready for users to try out the clients. You can either run the pip-installed client that comes with the Plom system, or you can download the binary client — see here.
The plom-demo creates 3 users; you can find their usernames and passwords in serverConfiguration/userListRaw.csv. You’ll need one of those usernames and passwords and then follow these instructions to get the client up and running.
5. Shutting down the demo
One can stop the demo either by python process.