No More Marking is going Serverless!

Chris Wheadon
The No More Marking Blog
4 min readJun 4, 2019

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We are delighted to announce that No More Marking is today releasing its new website at beta.nomoremarking.com, built completely from scratch, to ensure that we can meet the growing demand on our service. We will continue to provide free access for all research purposes and for teachers who just love judging, alongside paid access to our national projects.

Why did we need a new site?

Performance

One of the challenges of our national projects is that we require teachers to judge work within a short space of time, usually a week. What this means in practice is that most people judge immediately after school on Wednesday! The first time we experienced the Wednesday 3.45 surge three years ago, we were taken completely unawares and, as a result, the site was down for around 5 minutes. You can see the judging pattern from our recent Year 6 national judging session below.

Decisions per hour recorded during Year 6 judging week

The peaky pattern represents a considerable challenge for a web application. In the past you would have to either provision large amounts of servers which would lie redundant most of the time and prove costly. Or, you could under-provision servers, and customers would experience time outs during peak periods. Luckily for us, there is a new cloud software paradigm called serverless, whereby you have access to unlimited virtual servers on demand, and you only pay for requests to the servers. This means we no longer have to sit glued to our logs on Wednesday afternoons wondering when to hit the button to deploy more server capacity! For our users it means performance will be unaffected whether we have 10,000 teachers judging on the site or 100,000.

Security

Internet sites are clearly a target for malicious behaviour, so security is a key concern. While we have always used some Amazon Web Services, we have now moved our entire API to Amazon Web Services as they provide all the necessary tools to maintain a secure environment. For user logins we have chosen to use Auth0, the leading experts in identity management, who offer protection against malicious attempts to access user information.

Simplicity

Our goal in setting up No More Marking was to make Comparative Judgement simple and accessible to anyone who wishes to uses it. While we provide a strong underlying statistical model, and a number of powerful tools such as moderation and anchoring, we have tried to abstract this complexity away from most users so they can achieve what they want in three simple steps to judging.

The judging widget

Perhaps the greatest confusion we see amongst users is how many decisions they need to make to get a reliable result. To try and simplify the process we have introduced a simple widget that does the calculation for you. Simply adjust the number of judges you expect to have, click on Adjust, and the judge quota will automatically be set.

Continuing development

The new site marks an exciting new phase in Comparative Judgement as we see its use in large scale assessment for the first time ever. We obviously have lots more plans for the site and will continue to develop and improve it in response to your feedback. Top of our list are better data sharing across consortia, and better online analytics.

What you should do next

The new site is now open to all, and will be used for all national judging sessions from Sept 2019. We will keep the existing site open until September 1st 2019 to allow you to complete any live judging sessions you have on the live site.

As all our images expire after 1 year, we have decided not to transition existing tasks from the current site to the new site, so you do need to make sure you have saved any data or images you wish to keep by that date.

We recommend you start the transition to the new site as soon as possible. Most of your user data such as your purchase data, your school information and your Assembly connection has been preserved. All you need to do is update your password following this transition guide.

We really hope that you will find the transition relatively painless, and look forward to your feedback via Twitter or by chatting to us on the site beta.nomoremarking.com, or by sending us an email at support@nomoremarking.com .

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