Gradescope marking guide for exam MCQs

This is a marking guide for staff whose students have completed multiple choice exam questions through an on-campus handwritten exam that has been digitally scanned for marking on Gradescope.

The guidance follows the sequence in which you should proceed once your students’ scanned submissions have been uploaded to Gradescope and prepared by the Digital Assessment Support team. There are two parts to the process:

• Part 1: Review your student submissions and groupings
• Part 2: How to mark your students' exams

Part 1: Reviewing your student submissions and groupings

If you are using Gradescope for marking an on-campus digitally scanned exam, the Digital Assessment Support team will allocate the student ID to the correct name on the LMS roster and do the grouping of your multiple choice answers for you. It’s recommended that you check to confirm both the student name allocations and the groupings of responses.

1. After the Digital Assessment Support team notifies you that your exams are ready for marking, review the student IDs by selecting ‘’Manage Submissions’ in the left-hand menu. When you have confirmed they are correct, click ‘Grade Submissions’ in the bottom righthand corner.

2. Next, in the Grade Submissions view, you’ll see the list of questions to mark from your exam outline. Select one of your multiple-choice questions to begin reviewing the groupings of the submissions.

3. Select ‘Review First Group’ to confirm that the answers have been grouped correctly.

Note: In the unlikely event that some groups contain the same answers and need to be merged, you can select ‘Merge’ to merge the groups. You need to select the groups you want to merge and then click 'Merge Selected' in the bottom action bar.

4. Once all groups have been reviewed, you will see to the ‘Ungrouped Answers’ page (if there are any). Any outlying answers, such as in cases where students lettered answer is poorly written and unable to be recognised by the AI, will end up as ungrouped. You can review and add ungrouped answers to a group by clicking and dragging, or by clicking on each answer and then clicking on the group.
5. If needed you can go back and re-review any groupings by clicking ‘View Groups’ in the bottom action bar. Once you have finished grouping, click 'Grade Answers' in the bottom action bar. You will start by marking the groups you confirmed earlier followed by any remaining ‘ungrouped’ submissions. You will need to use rubrics to mark student submissions (see below on how to set up rubrics in Gradescope).

Part 2: How to mark your students exams

1. Choose how you will score

In Gradescope, you have the choice of negative or positive scoring for marking.

To select your scoring system, you will need to navigate to 'Settings' in the left-hand menu. Then under the 'Grading Defaults' section, select either 'Positive scoring' or ‘Negative scoring’ and then make sure the setting for 'Apply these settings to all questions' is checked.

Note: By default, Gradescope is always set to negative scoring. The image below shows how to change the setting to positive scoring.

Negative scoring

By default, the rubric is set to ‘negative scoring’. Negative scoring means that the student starts off with full marks and then the rubric items you set in the rubric will detract marks from the student’s score rather than award them marks.

An example of a negative scoring rubric looks like this:

Positive scoring

Alternatively, positive scoring means that students start off with zero points and then the rubric items must be selected to award points to students.

2. Create your rubric

The rubric tool

Gradescope’s rubric tool is the recommended way to mark submissions. Not only does using the rubric tool allow you to mark faster and more efficiently, it ensures there is a uniformity across the feedback by mitigating the risk of inconsistencies between each student's marks. The rubric ensures that that the same number of points are being awarded/subtracted for certain answers.

Once the rubric has been set, there is always the option to add more rubric items or edit existing ones after reviewing the received student submission – although the rubric items should be agreed upon and finalised before any marking commences.

Note: Once a rubric has been set up for a question and the marking process has begun, do not modify or edit the rubric. Doing so will affect every student submission which has already been marked for that question. In rare cases where changes are required, they should only be done in consultation with relevant teaching staff and markers.

While viewing the student submission, you can select the appropriate rubric item to award/deduct marks (depending on whether you selected positive or negative scoring). You can also include feedback specific to the student's submission in the text box below the rubric.

Note: You must select a rubric item for the question to be considered marked e.g. if (you are using positive scoring) and wish to award zero points, you must still select a rubric item labelled '0', for the submission to be considered marked. Add an example for the negative scoring like, “for negative scoring, even if a student has earned the full points you will need to have a rubric item called “correct answer” that subtracts 0 points.

Rubrics versus points adjustment

Below the rubric, you will see the option for ‘Points Adjustment’ underneath the rubric items. This allows you to manually enter a score or ‘adjust’ the score calculated from the rubric , but  we do not recommend using this to mark submissions as doing so undermines the ability to provide uniform feedback.

Next, navigate to the next submission for the same question by selecting 'Next Ungraded'. Moving to the next ungraded submission avoids more than one staff member grading the same submission at the same time.

Note: Remember that Gradescope works by allowing you to mark question by question (i.e. if you start with Question 1, you will mark all student submissions for Question 1 before moving on to another question).

3. Reviewing grades

Reviewing grades versus publishing grades

After marking your student submissions, you will be able to review grades where you will be able to see a full overview of all the marked submissions.

Note: Students are not able to see the grades until you publish them.

Be wary of clicking 'Publish Grades' as this will allow students to see their marks. If you have selected to publish them you will be able to identify those that are now visible to students as they will have 'Grades Published' in green next to them. Those that aren’t been published, you will have 'Grades Not Published' in grey next to them.

You will also be able to see whether students have viewed their marked submissions by the eye icon next to the submission in the ‘Viewed?’ column on the Review Grades page. If the eye icon is green, that means the student has viewed their submission.

Support and resources

Please submit a support request to Teaching and Learning Innovation with any questions about this tool.

University of Melbourne staff guides

• Getting started with Gradescope
• Gradescope (as off-campus digital open book exams) 
• Setting up Gradescope for an off-campus digital open book exam
• Gradescope (as on-campus written exams)
• Recommendations for the format of on-campus written exams

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