FAQs

No. PreMark™ allows you to print crucial information over your purchased answer sheets, but does not allow you to print the actual stock answer sheet.

PreMark™ will work only with select BenchMark™ 3000 answer sheets that are made for pre-printing. You can tell if your answer sheet is made for pre-printing if it has one thick vertical bar along the right side of your form. These bars are where the barcodes are overprinted. For a list of specific forms that can be used with PreMark™, contact us at premark@appersonprint.com.

Yes, but we will need to create a custom template for you. Please be sure to let your sales representative know that you are interested in using PreMark™ with your answer sheet so that the form can be properly designed to accommodate the requirements of PreMark™.

No, not at this time. However, please contact us at premark@appersonprint.com, as we may have an alternative solution for you.

PreMark™ generally works with any normal laser printer. The printer should be set to only print using black ink. Although binary and barcode pre-printing is much more forgiving than traditional pre-slugging, where marks must very precisely hit bubbles, customers must still be careful to check that their answer sheets are not shifting too much during the printing process. Every printer has different tolerances for how much documents may shift during printing. Please be sure to inspect answer sheets throughout your print run for alignment.

Yes, PreMark™ is only designed to work with Apperson's BenchMark™ 3000 test scanner.

Your data must be formatted in a Microsoft Excel^® spreadsheet. The spreadsheet should be in the same file format as the version currently installed on your PC (i.e., if the file format is Excel 2007, and you are running Excel 2003 on your computer, you must convert the file to Excel 2003 format). The data should be entered into your spreadsheet as you wish to see it printed. For example, if the data is in all capitals in your spreadsheet, it will print in all capitals. If you have your students' first names and last names in separate columns, you will have to print them in separate fields on your answer sheet.

There are two types of data being printed by most customers: human-readable data and machine-readable data. The human-readable data will be things such as the student's name and test name. This data is generally more useful for knowing to whom the answer sheet should be provided. On the other hand, you will also be printing machine-readable data. This is data that the scanners will read. This data will be printed as a barcode along the side of your answer sheets. Typically machine-readable data is the critical information you must capture in order to tie the test data back to a student and to know what test the answer sheet represents. Machine-readable data can only be numeric. The human-readable data can be alphabetic and/or numeric.

Only fields in your file that contain numeric only data will be shown as eligible for barcoding. If PreMark™ is not presenting the field you want to print, it is likely that one or more of your cells contains non-numeric data. To fix this, you must remove the non-numeric data from your roster and refresh your session.

The amount of data that you can pre-print depends on the size of the fields on your answer sheet. Some sheets are more restrictive than others. Please be aware that some BenchMark forms do not allow more than 14 characters to be barcoded. The size limitation for how many characters can be barcoded depends on how many fields you are pre-printing in these areas, so it is difficult to provide an exact maximum number of characters.

You have exceeded the maximum character length allowed for the barcode for your particular form. You will need to deselect one or more fields or find a way to reduce the size of one or more of your fields within your roster file and re-import.

Most likely the problem is that you have not enabled those fields to be displayed in DataLink™. To display the fields, in DataLink™ go to View, select Scanner Results Grid Options and then select the checkboxes next to the fields you want to view.

You should always print a few sample answer sheets before printing your entire roster file's worth. You should both visually inspect your answer sheets and, more importantly, scan your sample answer sheets to ensure that the data is being brought into DataLink™ in the way that you expect.

Try closing your session of PreMark and re-mapping your roster/spreadsheet. If the problem persists, we recommend that you update your Adobe Reader software v. 7 or higher.