This guidance outlines the steps that you should follow to submit scanned handwritten answers to take home exams and other assessments in Blackboard.
Please ensure that when you submit the scans, that they are a single PDF file.
- Write your answers to the questions onto plain, lined or graph A4 paper where possible, please include a number on the page that indicates the order.
- If you have a mobile phone, use a scanning App, such as:
- Microsoft Office Lens Android | iOS
- Microsoft Office app Android | iOS
- or Apple iOS Notes Scanner, to capture your pages.
- Whichever app you plan to use, make sure that you have installed it in advance of the exam, and are confident in how to use it.
- Some apps only allow you to scan a few pages into a single file – for instance, with the MS OneDrive app you can scan a maximum of 10 pages, which may not be enough for some exams.
- The latest versions of MS Office, Office Lens and iOS Notes Scanner apps have a much higher limit which should be more than enough to scan all pages of your exam.
- Take the scan in a well-lit environment
- Check that the scan is readable
- Save the scans as a single PDF document – both the Office apps and iOS Notes can do this for you.
Don’t use the OCR tools built into these apps to convert the image to text – this will almost certainly introduce some errors. - Transfer the scans to your computer.
- Email to yourself or share to your preferred cloud storage e.g. OneDrive.
- If you do not have a computer, please see guidance for submitting to Blackboard using a mobile device.
- Upload and submit the PDF file to the submission point on your Blackboard module.
See guidance on- Submitting to a Blackboard Assignment
- Submit handwritten work to Turnitin
- Submitting to a Blackboard Test – see ‘Answer Essay Questions’.
- Submitting to Gradescope
If it really is not possible for you to combine your images into a single PDF, you can submit individual image files to a Blackboard Assignment.
If you do this please ensure that
- you submit all of the files in one attempt
- the files are submitted in the correct order
- the images all have the same orientation (not a mixture of landscape and portrait)
Guide last updated on November 28, 2022
