Competition Marking
Competition Marking is the admin workflow for coordinating how experts evaluate student work during a competition session. Unlike Teacher Marking (one teacher grading with Pass/Partial/Fail) or Remote Marking (first-come-first-served team marking), Competition Marking uses explicit marking assignments that link modules to rooms, teams, and auth keys.
Accessing the Marking Page
When the Marking feature is enabled on a competition session, a Marking item appears in the main sidebar. Clicking it opens the marking admin page. If Remote Marking is enabled instead, you'll see Remote Marking here — see the Remote Marking guide for that mode.
Top Stats Card
At the top of the marking page, a stats card shows the current state of your marking workflow at a glance:
- Rooms — Number of physical or virtual marking rooms you've created
- Teams — Number of expert teams assigned to mark
- Assignments — Total marking assignments currently created
- Completed — How many assignments have reached 100% completion
Below the row, a global progress bar shows the overall marking percentage averaged across all assignments. It updates as experts complete competitors, giving you a single-glance view of how the entire marking effort is tracking.
Expert Marking Room Login Link
The right sidebar on every tab (except Errors) shows an Expert Marking Room card with the public login URL that experts and judges use to access their assignments. It includes:
- The public URL displayed as a code block
- A one-click copy button to paste it into emails, Slack, or briefing documents
- An Open Marking Room button that launches the login page in a new tab — useful for checking what experts will see when they connect
Share this URL with your experts along with their individual auth keys from the Assignments tab (see below). Each expert enters the URL and their 6-character auth key to reach the room.
Tab 1: Assignments
This is the primary tab — it's where you create, authorize, and monitor marking assignments. Each assignment represents one (module × team × room) combination: a specific expert team marking a specific module in a specific room on a specific day.
Creating assignments
Two ways to create assignments:
- Generate — Auto-creates assignments based on your rooms, teams, and modules. Use this once your rooms and teams are set up to get a baseline schedule in one click. Warning: Generate removes all existing marking assignments first, so use it early, not after you've already customized the schedule.
- Add Assignment — Opens a modal where you pick the module, marking team, room, and competition day manually. Use this for one-off adjustments or when your structure doesn't match the auto-generation logic.
Authorization and auth keys
Each assignment gets a unique 6-character auth key. Experts enter this key on the public Expert Marking Room login page to access their assigned work. The authorization flow:
- Create the assignment (via Generate or Add Assignment)
- Click Request Code on the assignment row — the system provisions the auth key
- Share the marking room URL + the auth key with the team leader
- The team leader enters the key → the room authorizes and experts can mark
- You can deauthorize at any time to revoke access and delete the assignment
Marking statuses
Each assignment moves through a lifecycle you can track from the list:
- Pending — Authorized, experts haven't started yet
- In Progress — At least one competitor is being actively marked
- Completed — All competitors in this assignment have been fully marked (100%)
- Re-marking — Experts have gone back to revise at least one completed marking
- Error — An expert reported a problem through the error feedback loop (see Tab 5)
Tab 2: Rooms & Teams
Marking rooms represent physical or virtual spaces where marking happens. Marking teams are groups of experts who work together in a room.
Creating marking rooms
Click Create Room and fill in the room's name and type. Room types influence where the marking happens and how workstations are visible. Rooms are the first building block — assignments reference a room, and multiple teams can rotate through the same room across days.
Creating marking teams
Click Create Team to add a team. Each team has a name, description, and a list of experts assigned to it. You can create teams before or after adding experts — the expert-to-team assignment happens on the Experts tab (see Tab 4).
Tab 3: Timetable
The Timetable is a day-by-day grid view showing which teams are marking which modules in which rooms. It's the main monitoring view during an active marking session.
Reading the timetable
Each cell represents one marking assignment slot. Cell colors indicate state at a glance:
- Gray — Not started (pending)
- Yellow — In progress
- Green — Completed
- Red — Error reported
The progress bar below the timetable tracks overall completion for the day you've selected. Both the cell colors and the progress bar update in real time via WebSocket — when an expert submits a mark or starts a competitor, the timetable reflects it automatically without a refresh.
Editing time slots
Time slots define when marking windows open and close for each day. Use the Time Slots card in the right sidebar to add, edit, or reset slots to defaults. Time slots are per-session, so you can tailor them to your competition schedule.
Tab 4: Experts
The Experts tab is where you register experts, collect their skills and questionnaire answers, and assign them to marking teams. A pending-approvals badge appears on the tab header when self-registered experts are waiting for review.
For full details, see the dedicated Expert Management guide. Key points:
- Manual add — You add experts by hand; they're approved automatically
- Self-registration — Enable a public URL, experts register themselves, admin approves
- Auto-assign — One-click skill-balancing algorithm distributes experts across teams
- Team leader — Mark one expert per team as leader using the crown icon
Tab 5: Errors — the Error Feedback Loop
The Errors tab is the admin side of the Expert-Teacher Feedback Loop. When an expert hits a problem they can't resolve on their own — a competitor's deployment is broken, a file is missing, credentials don't work, anything blocking the evaluation — they report it from the marking room. Every reported error becomes a threaded conversation you can track and respond to from this tab.
4-state workflow
Each error moves through four states:
- Reported — An expert flagged a problem; waiting for an admin to pick it up
- In Review — You've acknowledged the issue and are investigating
- Needs Info — You've asked the expert a follow-up question; waiting on their reply before you can continue
- Resolved — The problem has been addressed and the expert can continue marking
Threaded messages
Every error has its own message thread. You and the expert can post back and forth without leaving the tab. Messages are stored persistently (they're the only marking-related content NStrim actually stores — general marking scores go on your organization's marking sheets). Each message is tracked with read/unread state so you can see at a glance which threads have new activity.
Notifications
New messages from experts trigger layered notifications:
- Banner — A persistent bar at the top of the page as long as there are unread messages awaiting admin response
- Inline badges — Each affected error row in the Errors tab shows a count of unread messages
- Toast pop-ups — A temporary pop-up appears when a new message arrives while you're on the page
Color-coded status
The error list uses color-coded icons next to each entry — red for Reported, blue for In Review, yellow pulse for Needs Info, green for Resolved — so you can scan for what needs attention without reading every row.
Tab 6: Settings
The Settings tab holds marking-specific configuration that doesn't belong in the main session settings. Examples include:
- Expert self-registration toggle — Opens a public URL so experts can register themselves (see Expert Management)
- Expert question list — Customize the yes/no questions shown to experts during self-registration
- Technology list — Customize the technologies experts rate their skills on