Gradescope

What is Gradescope?

Gradescope is a feedback and assessment tool that dramatically reduces the pain and time associated with grading exams, homework, and other assignments. Gradescope is widely used for delivering assessments remotely. It enables instructors and graders to give better and more timely feedback, resulting in improved learning outcomes.

Dynamic rubrics help streamline the tedious parts of grading while increasing grading consistency. AI-assisted Grading allows instructors to automatically group similar answers and grade all the answers in each group at once. Gradescope also helps with grading programming assignments at scale and can automatically grade printed bubble sheets.

In this article:

Getting Started with Gradescope for Instructors/TAs

Gradescope Integrated with Canvas (recommended)

The University of Minnesota has integrated Gradescope with Canvas using LTI 1.3 standards. This integration allows instructors to sync their Canvas roster with Gradescope and post Gradescope grades back to Canvas. It also provides a seamless assignment submission and review process for students and TAs. 

  1. Login to Canvas.
    • On the left sidebar, go to Courses and select your course.
  2. Link your Canvas and Gradescope courses
  3. Sync your roster
  4. Create a Gradescope assignment and link it to Canvas
  5. Grade submissions
  6. Post grades from Gradescope to Canvas

Note:  Currently, this LTI is only available to the College of Science and Engineering. It will be made available to other colleges in Spring 2022. If you are not in CSE, you may still use Gradescope. Please follow the instructions below “Gradescope without Canvas Integration

Gradescope without Canvas Integration

  1. Sign up for Gradescope: Create an instructor account at gradescope.com using your University of Minnesota email address. 
    • Go to the Gradescope Sign Up Form.
    • Click the Instructor button.
    • Fill out your first name, last name, and enter your University of Minnesota email.
    • In the school popup menu, choose University of Minnesota from the list.
    • You do not need to enter an invite code.
    • Click the Sign up as an instructor button.
    • If successful, a signup acknowledgement page should appear.
    • Check your University of Minnesota email account for a new Welcome to Gradescope! email from gradescope.com containing additional instructions to set up your Gradescope account, set your password, etc. The email may take a few minutes to arrive.
  2. Create your course
  3. Create an assignment
  4. Grade submissions
  5. Return work to students

Scanning Papers for Gradescope

The Office of Measurement Services (OMS) offers Gradescope and PDF Scanning Services. This includes:

  • Scanning of written paper exams or homework assignments to PDF for instructors who use Gradescope.
  • PDF scanning services include orienting documents, cutting off staples or booklet bindings, and ensuring pages are scanned and oriented correctly.
  • For additional information or questions please email oms@umn.edu.

Gradescope FAQs for Instructors

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Is there a feature in Gradescope that will let me set different deadlines for submission based on a course section?

  • Unfortunately, there currently is not a way to set different deadlines for students with one exam in Gradescope. 
  • If they are all taking the same exam, a workaround is to use Canvas to release the exam to different sections at different times using the “Assign to” feature in Assignments. You will have to use the Gradescope timestamp to verify the exam was submitted on time.
  • Otherwise, you will have to create different exams for each section in Canvas.

Is there a way on Gradescope to revert to a previous submission and use that version?

Yes! However, this fix can only be made by an instructor in Gradescope. To do this, the instructor can pull up the older submission from the student’s Submission History, click Download Original to download it, and upload it back to the assignment via the Upload Submission button on the assignment's Manage Submissions page. This will make the older submission the active one and will make it appear as the default for grading.

How do students view instructor comments in Gradescope after grades have been posted to Canvas?

Students will need to return to the exam in Gradescope to see comments. They may navigate there in two ways: a) through the assignment in Canvas if an external tool was used or b) through the Gradescope link in the left navigation of Canvas. Note that if the exam is locked in Canvas, students should use the Gradescope link in the left navigation of the Canvas course. Instructors should make this link available if they plan to lock the exam (i.e. use the “Available until” date) in Canvas.

Is there a way to either hide the assignment outline point values from students or change them after students have already submitted?

When creating the outline for the Gradescope assignment, you must select point values for each problem, and the students can see this distribution when they submit. While you cannot hide point values from students, you may change them after assignments have been submitted. Thus, if you would prefer that students do not initially see point values, one solution is to enter “0” for each problem and then change the point values after students have submitted their assignments.

Getting Started with Gradescope for Students

Getting Help with Gradescope