  The internal working of low-mass stars is of great significance to both the
study of stellar structure and the history of the Milky Way. Asteroseismology
has the power to directly sense the internal structure of stars and allows for
the determination of the evolutionary state -- i.e. has helium burning
commenced or is the energy generated only by the fusion in the hydrogen-burning
shell? We use observational data from red-giant stars in a combination (known
as APOKASC) of asteroseismology (from the \textit{Kepler} mission) and
spectroscopy (from SDSS/APOGEE). The new feature of the analysis is that the
APOKASC evolutionary state determination is based on the comparison of diverse
approaches to the investigation of the frequency-power spectrum. The high level
of agreement between the methods is a strong validation of the approaches.
Stars for which there is not a consensus view are readily identified. The
comparison also facilitates the identification of unusual stars including those
that show evidence for very strong coupling between p and g cavities. The
comparison between the classification based on the spectroscopic data and
asteroseismic data have led to a new value for the statistical uncertainty in
APOGEE temperatures. These consensus evolutionary states will be used as an
input for methods that derive masses and ages for these stars based on
comparison of observables with stellar evolutionary models (`grid-based
modeling') and as a training set for machine-learning and other data-driven
methods of evolutionary state determination
