What is GradeScope?

Gradescope is a tool that can be very useful for larger courses to give student feedback, speed up grading, and excels in courses where students handwrite equations or calculations. Students can upload their handwritten materials and Gradescope can analyze and preliminarily grade these materials using rubrics you have programmed in. Moreover, graders can easily mark up and assess student work, delivering those markups back to students for feedback or reassessment.

How can you use GradeScope in your course?

While Gradescope has a bit of a learning curve, large lecture courses have found it to be an effective tool for student assessment and especially student retakes.  Because Gradescope assists with preliminary grading, it can cut down on time spent per exam and allow graders to focus on the most important parts of student work and giving meaningful feedback.

Within GradeScope, you can set custom rubrics that will then be applied to student work submitted through the program. It can replace scanned bubble sheets for quizzes and exams and can allow students to submit handwritten work electronically that can then be analyzed and pre-graded by GradeScope, with any questions or unclear answers highlighted for your teaching team to assess. Moreover, it makes it very simple to annotate and give feedback on submitted work, either from you or from your teaching assistants or fellow instructors.

For ease of grading, GradeScope can select portions of each submission to grade in batches. Instead of grading each student’s submission in its totality and then moving on to the next, GradeScope can allow you to see all of the submissions to one question at a time, and therefore grade them quickly and efficiently.

What results can you expect from incorporating GradeScope into your course?

Faculty in UI courses have found GradeScope to be a powerful tool for assessment and grading. MATH:1005 and MATH:1440 are both currently using GradeScope, and the teaching teams of graduate assistants have reported that grading in GradeScope with its rubrics and machine grading have decreased their grading workload significantly. This frees up precious time of your teaching team to engage with students, offer assistance in other areas of need, and perform better at their jobs.

Who can help if you’re interested in incorporating GradeScope into your course?

If you are interested in using Gradescope in your course, please reach out to the Academic Technologies team in the Office of Teaching, Learning and Technology.

For further information on Gradescope best practices, please consult this site: https://teach.uiowa.edu/gradescope/best-practices

If you would like to explore how you could use this in your course, please reach out to the Center for Teaching for assistance and guidance on how best to implement these activities.