Why Gradescope?

Providing efficient, consistent and personalized feedback is crucial to optimize student learning outcomes and enrich their learning experience. The quote may resonate with you in this case.

“…one of our most important, but often least liked, roles is that of grader: creating assignments to develop and measure proficiency on fundamental skills, providing effective feedback on those assignments, and assigning a fair and meaningful grade representing achievement. In our role as graders, we must often balance our desire to provide the most formative practice-feedback experience with the amount of time it takes to grade.” (Atwood, 2018)

What is Gradescope?

Gradescope is a web-based tool (integrated with Canvas) that supports grading quickly, equitably, and flexibly while providing detailed formative feedback to students. In specifics, it enables instructors to

  • grade student submissions online anywhere
  • digitalize, recognize, and group written answers with AI assistance
  • create and apply grading rubrics with prompts
  • change the point value associated with a particular mistake once and apply to the entire population
  • quickly reuse the same comment applying to the same situations
  • make collaborative grading possible and consistent
  • return feedback and grades digitally with a few clicks 
  • get a clear picture of how your students are doing and whether they read the feedback
Use Cases at DKU

Since its pilot in early 2019 at Duke and then DKU, Gradescope has been used in sciences, economics, programming, and language courses to manage and grade multiple types of assessments, including but not limited to the following:

  • Homework & Problem Sets: Economics essay assignments, Math problem set assignments, Physics lab reports, and Chinese written assignments
  • Bubble Sheets: Biology multiple choice tests
  • Exams & Quizzes: Data Science and Physics online exams
 

Problem Set Assignments and Exams PHYS 121 is a course consisting of lecture and lab components, with 61 students enrolled in fall 2020. Gradescope was used in this course to grade problem set assignments, exams, and lab reports. Prof. Kai Huang found it

  • well integrated with Latex for inserting formula and subject-specific symbols
  • allows remote students to submit paper-and-pencil assignments or exams
  • automatically groups student short responses, which enables quick grading as well as visualizes common response trends 
  • supports batch scan and upload of students’ exams
 

Assignments with Multiple Question Types CHINESE 201 is a team-taught course. In fall 2020, four instructors collaboratively taught 56 students across the world in seven sections. Gradescope was used to grade the unit interpretive task sheets with multiple question types, such as short-answer questions that require Chinese character writing. The teaching team represented by Prof. Xiaofei Pan found that Gradescope is able to

  • support in-text comments anywhere on the document, which is extremely helpful for hand-writings
  • keep grading consistent among the teaching team, in that
    • it enables the instructor to develop customized rubrics and share with others
    • it could update the comments or scores even for the graded ones if any change to the rubric 
    • reuse previous comments in the same course 
  • allow certain flexibility by adjusting a point value
 

Short Essay Assignments ECON 101 is an introductory economics class with 64 students enrolled in two sections. Prof. Peter Sattler used Gradescope in this course, in order to streamline the grading procedure and provide detailed feedback for the short essay assignments. According to Prof. Sattler, Gradescope

  • enables him to create rubrics to grade consistently and add aligned explanations for each question, which are also available to students once they receive their grades and feedback
  • allows customized keyboard shortcuts to add comments or select criteria from the rubric
  • can release grades and feedback along with the average performance of the whole class in each assignment through a customized email feature
  • provides basic statistics of student performance
  • captures whether or not students view the feedback from the instructor
 

In the end of our conversations with these faculty users, they all shared a common tip– it’s always important for instructor to provide a practice assignment for students to play around with this new tool before assigning a real assignment or exam.

Get Started with Gradescope

If you are new to Gradescope, you could start with the Get Started page on Gradescope website. The site gives you a big picture of its potential with a list of features along with tutorial videos.

For Faculty

In this faculty guide, you will find the step-by-step instructions to (1) link your Canvas course site with Gradescope, (2) sync the Canvas class roster, (3) set up assignments, (4) grade submissions, and (5) post grades to Canvas. You have to create a Gradescope assignment in Canvas Assignments first (may link it to the Modules/your weekly structure), and then grades can be synced to Canvas Grades easily.

As demonstrated above, Gradescope supports various types of assessments, including Exams & Quizzes, Homework & Problem Sets, Bubble Sheets, Programming Assignments, and Online Assignments. Click here for detailed instructions to set it up.

For Students 

You are also free to distribute the student guide in your class, where students will get to know how to (1) access Gradescope, (2) submit assignments (including Using the Greadescope Mobile App), and (3) view grades. 

Here are some tips summarized by Irene Li ’22 in Math major.

  • Log in Gradescope through Canvas course page (recommended) or the Login page choosing School Credential – Duke NetID.
  • Scan the written work following the instructions on this page about Using the Greadescope Mobile App.
  • Input scientific notations similar to LaTeX coding – only one minor difference in terms of “$$”rather than “$”.
  • Automatically submit what students have already uploaded and saved at the due date.
  • Countdown helps students with timing, if timed assignments.
  • Be clear about the deadline, the late due date (if any), and the academic policies set up by the instructor.
  • Submit a regrade request – both students and instructors will receive email notifications accordingly.
 

Contact Us

If you need further resources to get started, feel free to contact us at dku_ctl@dukekunshan.edu.cn or the faculty users.

Troubleshooting

If you come across any technical issue, please send your question (ideally with a screenshot of the error page) to both help@gradescope.com and dku_clt@dukekunshan.edu.cn, so that we can make a record and follow up on the request if needed.