EMMS — Exam Marking and Moderation System

A small web app that replaces the email-spreadsheet workflow used for anonymous exam marking at university. Students write their seat number on their paper; admins hold the seat → CID mapping; markers only see seat numbers when entering grades.

How it works

1. Admin opens /admin, creates an exam (entering primary and secondary marker emails up front), uploads a two-column CSV of seat_number, cid pairs, then clicks Start primary marking.
2. The admin exam page displays a share URL for each marker (/m/<examId>/<token>). The admin sends the primary URL to the first marker by whatever channel they prefer.
3. The primary marker clicks the URL, grades every seat, and clicks Marking is complete. The server picks a second-marking sample (boundary grades plus a random fill to ≥10% or ≥10 papers, whichever is larger).
4. The admin sends the secondary URL to the second marker, who only sees sampled seats (with the primary's grade visible) and grades each.
5. When the second marker completes, the server computes each seat's Final Grade: non-sampled seats inherit the primary grade; sampled seats within 5 points get the average; anything else (≥6 points apart or non-numeric) is flagged for admin resolution.
6. The admin sets final grades for any flagged rows. The status auto-flips to Ready for Canvas upload once every row has a final grade.
7. The admin downloads a Canvas gradebook XLSX with each student's CID and their final grade, ready to import into Canvas.

Auth

There is no login. Admin pages are open at /admin; marker pages are gated by an unguessable token in the URL. Rely on the obscurity of the deployment URL for testing. For production use, put the app behind your SSO of choice (e.g. Imperial federated login) before sharing the admin URL widely.

Stack

• Next.js 15 (App Router) + TypeScript
• Postgres via pg (any provider — Neon, Supabase, RDS, local)
• Tailwind CSS

Deploy to Vercel

The only required env var is POSTGRES_URL (auto-set when you add a Postgres integration during the deploy wizard).

PUBLIC_APP_ORIGIN (production)

Marker URLs baked into notification emails default to whatever hostname served the request that triggered the email. On Vercel that resolves to a *.vercel.app alias, which is not what we want reaching markers.

Set PUBLIC_APP_ORIGIN on the Production environment only to pin every outbound link to the canonical domain:

PUBLIC_APP_ORIGIN=https://ib-marking.imperial.ac.uk

Leave Preview and Development unchecked so those keep using their own hostnames. Redeploy Production after saving so the new value is picked up. Preview links and local dev continue to resolve to the request host automatically.

Running locally

npm install
export POSTGRES_URL="postgres://user:pass@localhost:5432/cid_seat"
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Canvas gradebook

The exported file is an .xlsx (Canvas Gradebook Import accepts both .csv and .xlsx). Canvas's standard import headers are used:

Student, ID, SIS User ID, SIS Login ID, Section, <Assignment column>

Only SIS User ID (the CID) and the assignment column are populated; Canvas matches students by SIS User ID. The SIS User ID column is Text-formatted (@) so Excel does not strip the leading zero from CIDs like 0123456 when the admin opens the file to review before uploading — the Canvas matcher requires the exact CID.