Gradescope

Gradescope is an assessment tool that supports online submission, grading, and feedback. It is particularly relevant for STEM subjects and other areas that require hand written and hand drawn responses from students.

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What is Gradescope?

Gradescope is an assessment tool that supports the creation of assignments, combining online and paper-based approaches, enabling students to submit their responses in various formats and streamlining staff grading and feedback processes.

Learning Environments has now added Turnitin’s Gradescope to the portfolio of educational technologies available to the University. Gradescope assignments can be created in any subjects or communities in Canvas.

Instructors can create Canvas assignments that link to Gradescope assignments, which the students can answer directly online and/or submit photographs or PDFs of their handwritten or hand-drawn work (e.g. graphs).

  • Assignments such as worksheets or open book exams can be presented to students as a templated paper.
  • Marking at scale is supported, multiple markers can mark different questions across several student submissions.
  • Machine learning and artificial intelligence are utilised to collate equivalent answers, markers can then mark the answers as a set rather than every student’s response individually.
  • Gradescope rubrics can be built and refined during marking to adapt to the wide range of student answers. Changes will apply to all assignments already marked to maintain consistency.
  • Feedback and annotation tools can be used with the rubric, or for individual responses, for both online and photographed handwritten/drawn submissions. Write each comment only once (apply previously used comments with a click).
  • Detailed assignment and question analytics can link questions to concepts to help explore student learning.

Teaching and learning applications

Gradescope assignments can be created through the LMS to present a variety of assessment activities to students, including worksheet exercises and online open book exams. Each can be created with different structures for student responses, according to the assessment requirements and the submission practicalities for students. For example, responses may be written on paper and photographed, or text and annotations can be entered into a document and saved as PDF. Students identify or adjust the area or page containing each question response before submission.

The advantages of using a Gradescope assignment include a greater variety of questions types and the streamlined staff marking of student responses.

Academic integrity

Access to activities and assessments in Gradescope is supported via the LMS. Staff should not share the URL’s of assessments directly with students to avoid student’s trying to login via the service directly as this can bypass notices and timed controls in the LMS. For this reason, staff are also encouraged to make use of the 'time limit' function when setting up assessments in Gradescope.

It should be noted that ALL activity in Gradescope is logged, and logs can be requested from Learning Environments to cross check student’s access, start, end and submission times for assessments.

Access and licensing

All University of Melbourne staff have access to Gradescope through the University licence.

Variations exist to the standard Terms of Service for University of Melbourne staff and students.

Getting started

  • Enable Gradescope in your Subject by going to Settings, click on the Navigation tab, drag Gradescope into the top section
  • Click on the new Gradescope link in your subject navigation menu to open the Gradescope interface and create a new assignment
  • Navigate to your subject's Assignments area and create a new Canvas Assignment; select External Tool type, and choose Gradescope from the list
  • Click on the Gradescope tool to see all the assignments, edit to link the Gradescope assignment to the Canvas Assignment.

Student submissions are viewed and marked from the Gradescope interface, and can be accessed from either the Canvas Assignment or the Gradescope tool link in the subject navigation menu.

Support and resources

Please submit a support request to Learning Environments with any questions about this tool.

The following resources are available for staff and students:

Unimelb guides

Vendor guides

  • A general Gradescope walkthrough video
  • A Gradescope video with scanning tips and best practices
  • Gradescope Get Started page featuring other helpful short videos
  • Gradescope Help Centre for written documentation and frequently asked questions