Gradescope: A Tool for Helping Grade More Quickly and Consistently, and for Managing Handwritten Responses

Gradescope is an online program designed to provide an environment for consistent grading through the use of rubrics for point assignment and sets of standard responses to common errors. You can thereby grade assignments, quizzes, and exams faster and more uniformly, provide graders with guidance, and give better feedback to students.

Gradescope is especially useful for materials that are handwritten, providing an interface for students to turn in scans of their paper assignments, which can then be structured within the program to link responses to particular questions.

Gradescope is popular with mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and other scientists who assign problems requiring mathematical or diagrammatic responses. But it is also useful for other disciplines with text that is difficult to typeset such as languages using non-Roman alphabets, or for more graphical materials such as musical scores or maps.

Here is a short introduction:

The basic process is as follows:

  1. Instructor prepares homework or exam questions. This could be as a PDF delivered to students, or as another online document.
  2. Students print the document or simply reference the question numbers on blank sheets of paper. In either case, they print their name at the top of each page, answer the questions, and assemble their responses in proper order.
  3. Students scan the document with their smartphones, using any of a number of available scanning apps, or on a regular scanner. Alternatively they can be submitted in physical form to the graders, who then scan them (e.g. with a sheet-fed scanner).
  4. The scans are uploaded to Gradescope under the student’s name, and their answers are delineated with drawing tools, in correspondence to the instructor’s template.
  5. Faculty or graders score submissions on Gradescope, each question across all students, using a standard rubric and providing comments from a set describing common errors. If the rubric needs to change, point assignments are automatically updated.

Get Started with Gradescope

Academic Technology Services would be happy to meet with you to help get you started with Gradescope; just leave us a request at https://askit.amherst.edu . If you want to get started immediately, you can log in to Gradescope using the College’s single sign-on:

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The series of steps required to login to Gradescope: “Log In”; “School Credentials”; “Amherst College”; username and password

You can also (or in addition) visit these help documents on Gradescope’s Web site:

https://www.gradescope.com/get_started

The Gradescope Tool in Moodle can pass course information and authorization to Gradescope to simplify assignment set up and access by students, and can link directly to assignments in Moodle to return grades. 

Learn how to integrate Gradescope into Moodle