Most first uploads fail for four reasons, and none of them is handwriting.

Centres expect the hard part to be whether a machine can read a student’s writing. In practice that is rarely what goes wrong. What goes wrong is how the pages arrived — and every one of these is fixable in the thirty seconds before the photograph is taken, which is much cheaper than fixing it afterwards.

The four

1. The page is sideways

The commonest one by a distance. A student photographs a page in landscape, or turns the sheet to fit the frame. Nothing rotates it for you — the page is read as it came. Sometimes that still works: on the paper we published, two of six pages were sideways and were marked anyway. Sometimes it does not, and the result looks like a student who left answers blank.

Fix: tell students to hold the phone in portrait and turn the sheet, not the phone. One sentence in the WhatsApp group before the first test removes most of this.

2. The answer is not on the page the question expects

Students continue an answer overleaf, or go back and add to question 11 after finishing question 17. Anything that has to search for an answer can miss it. On our published paper this happened once, to question 13, and the feedback says so in the student’s own report: “Marked again after your answer was found on page 3 — the grader had missed it.”

Fix: ask for the question number to be written before every answer, including continuations. This is already a board-exam habit; it just matters more here.

3. Part of the page is missing from the frame

A thumb over the margin, the bottom two lines cut off, a page shot at an angle so one edge tapers away. A cropped page is reported back with the page named and left unmarked rather than guessed at — which is correct behaviour and still costs you a re-shoot.

Fix: all four corners of the sheet inside the frame, phone parallel to the desk, not leaning over it.

4. Pages arrive out of order, or one is missing

Six pages sent as five, or page 4 photographed twice and page 5 not at all. Nobody notices until the marks come back short.

Fix: number the pages by hand, 1 of 6 through 6 of 6, before photographing. It takes a student ten seconds and it is the single highest-return habit on this page.

These four are the ones that decide a first batch. The full list of what makes a paper hard to mark runs to a hundred and eleven, grouped by stage.

Phones or a scanner?

There is no need to choose once and for ever. Most centres start on phones because it costs nothing and proves the thing works, and buy a scanner only when chasing six students for missing pages has become somebody’s Tuesday.

Common questions

Do students need to install an app?

No. It runs in the browser on any phone, including older Android devices, and the camera is the phone’s own. Nothing to download, nothing to keep updated, and nothing that will stop working when a student changes handset.

Is a scanner app like CamScanner better than the plain camera?

Marginally, and for one reason: the edge detection crops to the sheet and flattens the perspective, which removes failure three above. It does not fix rotation or page order. If students already use one, fine; it is not worth mandating.

What scanner should a school buy?

Any duplex sheet-feed (ADF) office scanner is adequate — this is not demanding work, and 300 dpi in greyscale is plenty. The two features that matter are duplex (both sides in one pass, since answer sheets are written on both) and a feeder deep enough that somebody is not standing over it. We do not sell hardware and have nothing to gain from the recommendation.

What happens if a page genuinely cannot be read?

It is handed back with the page named and its questions left unmarked, for a teacher to mark by hand. It is not guessed at and it is not silently scored zero. A system that always returns a mark is hiding this from you rather than not having the problem. More on where it must not be trusted.