Earlier this year when we began to understand the scope and impact of COVID-19 on campuses worldwide, we decided to offer Gradescope Complete free through the remainder of the term to help instructors with the urgent transition to remote assessment.

It’s become clear that even if students and faculty return to campus in the Fall many universities must also plan for remote alternatives. For that reason, we will continue to offer Gradescope Complete free for individual instructors through 2020.

With more instructors using Gradescope in remote settings than ever before, we’ve received valuable feedback and feature requests that our team has been working hard to implement. We enhanced the online assignments workflow, including adding time limits and extensions, images in question text, and options for students to upload files to a question and download a template or instructions for a paper-based assignment.

Still, the question we have received most over the last few months is how to maintain integrity in your remote assessments. We know it’s critically important to you and your universities to ensure students are completing their assignments and exams on their own. In response, we’re working on building and integrating capabilities to help you secure and maintain the integrity of your assessments whether you’re in-person or continuing to instruct from a distance, and we will share updates as these become available.

While Gradescope can immediately help individual instructors set up and deliver assessments, some schools and universities are asking for broader, more integrated solutions. Though we are not able to offer institutional or departmental licenses for free, we work with institutions on flexible solutions that minimize costs and meet their needs. When we do that, we are able to integrate Gradescope into your LMS, bringing further efficiency to your existing grading workflows and systems.

Navigating the current circumstances is challenging and we want you to know that we are here to help. To get started with remote assessments, sign up for an upcoming workshop or view our recent webinars. You can also browse our FAQ for delivering remote assessments. We also continue to incorporate your feedback. You can view our progress on our public Gradescope roadmap or Twitter.

If you have any questions, feedback, or concerns, please always reach out to us at help@gradescope.com.

Extending Gradescope Complete Access for Instructors through 2020 was originally published in Gradescope Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are providing free access to Gradescope Complete for new courses created through December 31, 2020. We have also upgraded all existing 2020 courses. Below, you will find a list of remote assessment options in Gradescope Complete.

In addition, we are hosting open webinars to help instructors get started with remote assessments. If it would be helpful for your institution to have more formal support, training, or LMS integration, please reach out to help@gradescope.com, and we will work with you to make this as seamless as possible.

Common Remote Assessment Workflows

Fully-online assessments (no paper)

If your assessments do not require drawing or handwriting, or you prefer your students work completely digitally, you can use an online assessment, which:

• include a mix of automatically graded questions (including multiple choice and short answer) and manually graded questions (with the normal Gradescope Rubric)
• allow students to submit answers directly through Gradescope’s web interface
• can be time limited, where students have a designated amount of time from the moment of opening the assignment to complete it.

Learn more about online assignments at our Help Center.

Student-uploaded paper-based assessments

If handwriting or drawing is important to your assessment, or you want to administer your existing paper-based exam remotely, there are two options:

• If you can distribute paper copies or your students have printers, you can use a template-based assignment and have your students submit digitized copies.
• If your students can’t print, you can allow them to upload freeform work on blank paper and simply designate where they responded to each question.

Submitting for students is easy. Share our short video overview or the PDF Guide to get your students started.

More options and ongoing work

• If you have a bubble-sheet (multiple choice) assessment, your students can download, complete, and upload a paper bubble sheet, which will be automatically graded. Learn more about bubble sheets at our Help Center.
• We are currently hard at work to make things easier and enable more assessment use cases. Soon, you will be able to mix online assessments with paper-based student work. Students will be able to upload images to questions on online assignments. See below to follow our progress on this and other developments.

Webinars for Getting Started with Remote Assessment

Existing Users: Delivering Assessments Remotely

This webinar will go into detail on the above workflows to meet your immediate needs for remote assessments.

New Users: Get Started with Gradescope for Remote Assessments

This webinar will introduce Gradescope, help you set up a course, build an assignment, grade work and provide feedback, and share tips on how to conduct assessments remotely.

FAQs, Feedback, and Progress

• In the past week, we’ve received lots of feedback, questions, and feature requests. We appreciate all of the input you’ve shared with us so far — please keep sharing!
• We’ve created an FAQ Guide for delivering remote assessments.
• We’re working hard to incorporate your feedback. You can follow our progress on our Public Roadmap and Twitter.

If you have any questions, concerns, or thoughts, please reach out to us at help@gradescope.com, or reply to this email.

Thank you and stay safe,
- The Gradescope Team

Recent updates to help with urgent remote assessment needs (responding to COVID-19) was originally published in Gradescope Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

People often think grading work is primarily about instructors giving students feedback. While this is a critical part of grading, we think grading should actually provide actionable feedback to both students and instructors. Read on to learn how it can guide instruction, refine assessment, and improve outcomes. Here are 10 ways Gradescope helps turn grading into learning:

1. Gradescope Modernizes Traditional Grading

Gradescope was founded with the belief that there has to be a better way to evaluate student work. By combining deep instructor expertise with the latest machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), Gradescope leverages modern technology to dramatically reduce the pain and time associated with traditional grading.

“Gradescope has revolutionized how instructors grade homework and exams. I don’t use that word a lot, but once you’ve used this tool, there’s no going back.” Armando Fox, EECS, UC Berkeley

2. Gradescope Streamlines the Workflow

By creating a digital record of student work, Gradescope restructures the traditional grading workflow. Gone are the logistical nightmares associated with transporting and returning stacks of paper, marathon grading parties, and lost in-class time; gained are efficiencies that enable high-quality assessment from anywhere at any time.

“Gradescope gives me the flexibility to grade and return papers from anywhere, making it much easier for me to keep up with my teaching responsibilities while traveling.” Andrew Gillette, Math, University of Arizona

3. Gradescope Promotes Student Equity

Gradescope helps mitigate opportunities for unconscious bias in two key areas:

• By helping graders focus exclusively on the content of an individual answer rather than the students’ overall submission or identity.
• By helping teams of graders to build, maintain, and apply one aligned grading standard for all students

The result is a fairer learning experience for students and greater consistency across graders.

“Gradescope has made my grading not only easier but better. My rubrics are more consistent and fair, my students get more helpful feedback, and I actually enjoy grading exams!” Katrina LeCurts, CS, MIT

4. Gradescope Enhances Scoring Flexibility

Built in advance or created on the fly, Gradescope’s Dynamic Rubrics can be constructed collaboratively and adjusted at any time, automatically applying changes to previously graded work and creating a reliable real-time standard for all students. Keyboard shortcuts can help speed up the workflow, helping cut grading time even further.

“Retroactive rubric application is by far the best part. Not having to handle a huge stack of paper exams and do any summation was nice. Ergonomically it’s a lot easier to grade on a laptop than leaned over a table.” Ian Dunn, CS, Cal Poly SLO

5. Gradescope Promotes Meaningful Feedback

In addition to quick and consistent feedback, Dynamic Rubrics ensure students receive detailed insight into how points were awarded or deducted. With a richer understanding of evaluation criteria and guidelines around concept mastery, instructors can direct students to the best resources for their individual needs.

“Gradescope allows me to give a short quiz every day in my section of 60 students, and grade them all on my 30-minute train ride home. The students get immediate, custom feedback that helps them understand how they’re doing in the class, and helps me monitor how things are going as well.” Jesse Tov, CS, Northwestern University

6. Gradescope Systematizes Grading Patterns

Answer groups and AI-Assisted Grading deliver a more methodical approach to reviewing student work. Gradescope helps instructors digitize student submissions and identify patterns, subsequently arranging them in assessable groups. This process helps eliminate redundancies, saves time, and produces higher quality and consistent feedback at scale.

“I love being able to give group feedback. When you’re pressed for time, it’s hard to put a lot of positive feedback on problems, but when you can group them, it gives you the time to do that. I think my feedback was more detailed in general (and easier to read) using Gradescope than grading by hand.” Julie McGurk, Biology, UPenn

7. Gradescope Accelerates Feedback Loops

Once assessment is complete, graders can immediately publish and notify students with a single click, either directly via Gradescope, emailed, or exported to their institutions’ LMS. Students can then review the feedback and quickly manage confusion or disagreement by initiating a Regrade Request. With the Gradescope workflow, feedback can be timely, detailed, and developmental.

“Gradescope has transformed the way students in my classes approach reviewing their exam results. The availability of a convenient and robust regrade request process incentivizes carefully reviewing missed problems and facilitates communication about instructor expectations.” Samuel S Watson, Math, Brown University

8. Gradescope Supports Existing Assessments

The breadth of compatible assignment types is wide-ranging — from paper-based exams, quizzes, and homework, to online assignments, programming assignments, and multiple-choice. Gradescope can accommodate assessment preferences, existing assignments without adjustment, and a variety of disciplines, from humanities to the sciences.

“With Gradescope, I was able to get rid of Scantron sheets for nearly all the grading, and really grade their answers and give them the credit they deserve.” Susanne Hambrusch, CS, Purdue

9. Gradescope Highlights Student Learning

Gradescope produces meaningful and detailed student performance data to help identify knowledge gaps. Per-question and per-rubric item analytics deliver insight into which concepts were mastered and which were misunderstood. Graders can also measure course-level progress and align to key learning objectives with assignment statistics.

“The best thing is having the scoring details online. This lets us share more with the students. And later, we can analyze how well the questions worked, when we are not in the middle of the grading rush.” Cliff Shaffer, CS, Virginia Tech

10. Gradescope Helps Refine Instruction

The Gradescope data can also inform improvements to assessment and course content. With targeted visibility into students’ areas of strength and weakness, instructors can address potential roadblocks in real-time and scaffold new concepts appropriately. Gradescope also surfaces insights that can guide long-term curricular improvements and refined lessons that ensure critical learning objectives are truly understood.

“The statistics really help me understand what I can teach differently next time to help my students learn better. I also love being able to adjust a score/rubric item and have it update all the others with that same item marked.” Katie Johnson, Math, Florida Gulf Coast University

Interested in seeing more? Check out this webinar for tips on how to get the most out of Gradescope.

10 Ways Gradescope Helps Improve Teaching and Learning was originally published in Gradescope Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Reblogged from the “Prof LisaK — Teaching, Learning and edTech” blog. Lisa is a Professor and Program Coordinator in the School of Business at Conestoga College ITAL. In her blog, she is exploring edTech to improve teaching and learning.

I’ve been teaching a lot of math courses and one of the things I struggle with is marking. When you mark a math problem it’s not only about the final answer. The process is very important. Students could do everything right but make one small mistake and the final answer will be wrong. It’s important to recognize that a student understands the process as well as the final answer. I tell my students if they want full marks on a test, they need to show their work. And for the most part, they are pretty good at it.

It can take a long time to mark math tests because I have to mark both the process and final answer. I write lots of comments on my tests to help students understand where they went wrong. I know that most of them won’t read them, but for the ones that do, I want them to have the chance to learn from their mistakes. The problem is, students tend to make similar mistakes and as a result, I end up writing the same comments over and over again. When you are marking 40+ papers, that can take a long time.

A colleague of mine, Nancy Nelson told me about a program called Gradescope. She said she found it helped her be more efficient with her marking. I did some exploring and decided to give it a try. I have to say I’m sold. Rather than writing the same comments over and over again, I was able to set up a rubric with the comments I wanted to have (and associated points deductions) and apply them as I marked each question. Not only was it more efficient but it insured that I was marking consistently.

Gradescope is very simple and intuitive to use. First, scan or upload your test (or assignment) and identify the name and student number sections on the paper. Then identify the areas on the test/assignment were each question will be answered and assign marks for each question. You can set up your rubric here, or do it when you are marking. Once you have set up the test/assignment, you can import your class list with student numbers.

When students write the test or submit their assignment, you scan the tests into a PDF and import them into Gradescope. Gradescope matches each paper to the student number and you are ready to mark.

The one thing that Gradescope gives me that I can’t get by manual marking (without a lot of time spend doing the calculations) is data about the test; how students did on each question, the breakdown of the grades etc..

Being able to take my laptop and mark anywhere, without having all the papers to flip through was an additional benefit. It easy to start and stop. Whenever I had some spare time and I had my laptop or tablet close by, I could open up Gradescope and mark a question.

One other feature I really liked was the summary report that Gradescope produces. It shows the details of each question and what errors were made (if any). Students can see very quickly where they went wrong and what kinds of mistakes they made. As their teacher, I can see if there is a pattern to their mistakes and use that to focus how I help them.

Between the ease of marking, the reports and the data, I am hooked. This was such a great experience, I plan on using Gradescope for all my marking!

Happy Marking Everyone!

For more information on Gradescope go to their website: https://www.gradescope.com/

I just found out that Gradescope was bought by Turnitin (Turnitin acquires Gradescope). Maybe like Turnitin, Gradescope will become a standard on every campus.

Our entire team is staying together, and we are excited to accelerate the development of Gradescope under the Turnitin umbrella. Our users can expect the exact same speedy, high-quality service that they are used to, and our license agreements remain unchanged.

Four years ago, we set out to build software to save instructors time and provide students with better feedback. As educators, we knew that grading is a necessary process, but one that no one enjoys. Our goal for Gradescope became to be the best place to provide students with helpful feedback on all types of work as quickly and effectively as possible.

In the past four years, we have made incredible progress toward this goal. Instructors save time with an efficient workflow and AI-assisted grading. They also receive actionable insights about their assignments, including paper exams, homework, online assignments, and programming projects. Students often get feedback on their work in a matter of hours rather than weeks.

Thanks to a world-class team, we have built a product that is among the most loved in higher education. Gradescope has been used at over 600 schools, and over 60M student answers have been graded to date. Every day, our users let us know that we improve their lives, and our rapidly growing number of institutional licenses reflects the same.

And yet there is still so much to accomplish in the years to come, and so many schools that we hope to serve. In joining forces with Turnitin, we are excited to get to where we want to be much faster, with many more resources to build the product we envision, and deep institutional connections to distribute it.

Just like Gradescope, Turnitin was founded by a few UC Berkeley graduate students who saw an inefficiency in how students received feedback. Almost twenty years later, more than 30 million students at 15,000 institutions in 140 countries use Turnitin. Over one billion student papers have been submitted since the company’s founding. We are truly excited to work together and make the lives of instructors and students better and better.

Onwards,
Arjun, Sergey, Ibrahim, and the entire Gradescope team.

Gradescope Joins Turnitin was originally published in Gradescope Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My Experience with Gradescope’s Grading Tool as a Student
Lindsay Workman | UC Berkeley

I am a sophomore at UC Berkeley, intending to major in Political Economy with a minor in Middle Eastern Studies. I can positively say that Gradescope has enhanced my college experience. I think it’s an incredible tool, and it has really helped my peers and I with our classes.

I came from a small Jewish high school with a graduating class of 110 students. At my high school, small classes and close relationships with teachers were the norm. The thought of a professor not knowing my name was a wildly foreign concept.

I was nervous to transition to such a large university. Part of my (and arguably everyone’s) learning process is seeing and understanding where I went wrong. In high school, it was easy to meet with a teacher and discuss exams. However, in college, it is often difficult to reach out to a professor when they have over 400 students. Gradescope has helped bridge that gap for me. With Gradescope, I am able to see my exams, exactly where I made mistakes, and specifically why I lost points. In addition, I can easily submit a regrade request.

Gradescope brings clarity and transparency to the grading process, and it helps create a sense of fairness, which is something I appreciate. Although my transition into college was challenging, Gradescope has helped by making a large university feel a bit smaller.

Learn more about Gradescope and how it can help you streamline grading in your course.

We started Gradescope when we were PhD students at UC Berkeley. Even though we were teaching the futuristic subject of Artificial Intelligence, we were still grading exams the old-fashioned way: sitting around a table with big stacks of paper to pass around, red pens in hand, and boxes of pizza for fuel. It was logistically challenging, prone to inconsistent grading, and slow. Worst of all, we didn’t gain much insight into what the students actually learned — and the students often didn’t find our marks on their exam particularly enlightening, either.

There had to be a better way.

We built Gradescope to let instructors grade paper-based exams online. Gradescope lets instructors grade from anywhere, with consistent rubrics, and with AI assistance for grouping similar students answers together. In addition to exams, instructors can grade homework, bubble sheets, and even programming projects on the same platform. Most importantly, students get their work back much more quickly and with more actionable feedback. Furthermore, instructors receive helpful statistics as to what their students actually learned — we like to say that this turns grading into learning.

In the last year, we’ve hosted over 500,000 enrollments at over 600 universities, colleges, and high schools. All told, 40,000,000 students answers have been graded on Gradescope, with more and more of them first being grouped with AI-assisted grading. AI-assisted grading, along with other exclusive features, is now accessible to all instructors at over 20 institutions that have signed up for licenses in the last academic year. We’re honored to work with these schools, which span from small community colleges to some of the largest universities, and look forward to many more partnerships to come!

We’ve also had several more exciting things happen over the last year:

• Our CEO Arjun was featured in the Forbes 30 and 30 and Cafe 100 lists.
• We received a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an AI system for grading 10x faster using deep learning. We have already submitted a report on our work to an academic conference, and look forward to deploying the innovation we developed in the product.
• We presented a paper describing the fundamental Gradescope system at the Learning at Scale conference in 2017, and will be presenting a new paper on how higher-ed STEM instructors format their exams at Learning at Scale 2018 this June.
• We grew from 8 people to 13 people.

We’re looking forward to the road ahead! If you’d like to join us, we are currently hiring for multiple positions: https://angel.co/gradescope/jobs

Using AI to Turn Grading into Learning was originally published in Gradescope Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My Experience with Gradescope’s Grading Tool as a Teaching Assistant
By Aaron Barber, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | University of Michigan

:::

My initial experience with Gradescope was while I was an undergrad two years ago and was a TA for an upper-level Artificial Intelligence course. I had never heard of or worked with Gradescope before, but at the professor’s recommendation, I set it up for our course even after the course had started. It was the perfect grading tool for homework. For that AI course, we didn’t use Gradescope for exams (we didn’t want to scan all the handwritten exams), and the exam grading process was horrible (crumpled papers, massive stacks of exams, and a coordination nightmare between all of the TAs who graded). At that time, if I recall correctly, many courses in the computer science department at the University of Michigan were transitioning to use Gradescope for assignments and exams.

The following year, I was a TA for an intro programming course taken by all engineers at theUniversity of Michigan. We had 500+ students between all sections of the course, and we used Gradescope for parts of some homework assignments and for exam grading. Gradescope was the biggest game changer for exam grading. It reduced the grading process by hours, and it provided us with the ability to grade remotely (which for one exam allowed me to finish my portion of grading as I worked through the night at an airport).

While using Gradescope, I was impressed when the Gradescope support team reached out to offer me support without my prompting for help, and I was even more amazed at the speed in which they responded to answer my questions. It also seems that new features have continually been released since I first used Gradescope. It looks like the product is always improving, and I’m disappointed to not be teaching anymore to experiment with some of the new AI features. I think Gradescope has a really bright future and is an amazing tool for education.

—

Learn more about Gradescope and how it can help you streamline grading in your course.

A Game Changer for Grading was originally published in Gradescope Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are excited to reveal Gradescope’s new color scheme! It is a bit greener than before, and interface elements are darker in general. Over the years, we have noticed that the old Gradescope teal was too light and often made reading instructions or finding actions difficult. We have also been rewriting our older pages and felt it was a good time to reexamine our color scheme. Specifically, we chose to fully redesign the color palette, rather than giving people an additional setting they would have to find and choose to turn on. We believe that software should be accessible by default, and a new color palette is one of many improvements that we are working on.

What is color contrast?

Color contrast is used to describe how perceivable two colors are from one another. Color combinations with high contrast appear vibrant, while low contrast combinations are less distinguishable. The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, is an organization that has laid out recommendations for what color combinations have high contrast. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) take into account various forms of visual impairments that people can have. By designing and developing with these guidelines, Gradescope users with these visual impairments will have an easier time using the site.

Why were the old colors not accessible?

The WCAG provides an equation to help classify color combinations. Given two colors, it calculates a value between 1 and 21 — with 21 being the highest contrast level. For example, two white shades score really low while a white shade and a black shade score really high. The guidelines also specify that the minimum contrast level for paragraph text needs to have a score of at least 4.5 or higher. Gradescope’s old colors scored well below the recommended contrast level and thus weren’t accessible. The new colors now meet or exceed these contrast recommendations.

Why did the button style change?

The buttons in the action bar changed for a couple reasons. During user testing, we would often observe instructors and TAs unable to easily find a particular action in the action bar. The low contrast made various actions in the action bar difficult to read, and thus the actions didn’t stand out very much. While we wanted to improve contrast, we also didn’t want to darken the action bar very much because we preferred the vibrant color. Given these constraints, we added background colors to the buttons to provide sufficient contrast between the text color and the button color.

Why is this important?

For Gradescope, it is fundamental that we are able to meet the needs of all students, TAs, instructors, and administrators across a wide variety of environments and situations. Having accessible colors is one part in trying to meet those needs. Over the past few months we’ve been working to make Gradescope more accessible to assistive technology. Students who rely on screen readers or keyboard navigation should have an improved experience. We hope that you find all these changes a step in the right direction toward making Gradescope accessible for all.

As always, if you use Gradescope, send us questions or suggestions to feedback@gradescope.com and let us know what you think!

Gradescope’s Accessible New Look was originally published in Gradescope Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Anna Victoria Martinez-Saltzberg, PhD, is a Chemistry instructor at San Francisco State University. Gradescope is an online platform for grading handwritten, digital, and code assignments.
—

Grading papers never came without its hassles, until I discovered a tool called Gradescope. It has allowed me to grade my (scanned-in) paper exams in significantly less time. Here are a few ways Gradescope has helped make my life easier and my grading more efficient.

I’m freed from the pile.
In the Spring of 2015, I had 200 final exams to grade. They went everywhere I went. They came with me in a huge cardboard box to get an oil change. My husband and I traveled from San Francisco to Boston, and 92 exams came with me on the plane. Carting around exams is awful. Then someone told me about Gradescope. All of a sudden, I could easily grade my exams at home, at the airport, while traveling, anytime I had downtime and a decent internet connection. Gone were days of carrying exams across the country!

I can really focus in on grading one problem at a time.
Gradescope is amazing. Being able to grade one question at a time across all assignments has helped me create more specific grading criteria for each problem. I’m able to grade students’ work more consistently with a rubric for each question, which I can update as I go.

I can see helpful statistics about what mistakes my students made.
During or after grading, I can look up and see exactly how many (and which) students made a particular mistake. Did those students lose 3 points because they didn’t know how to convert units properly or because they made a small math error early on in their calculation? Gradescope has all that information.

Gradescope’s Answer Grouping and AI-Assisted Grading capabilities are game changers.
*Answer Grouping is available for all question types. AI-Assisted Grading currently is available for multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank math questions.

Gradescope was already saving me considerable time over grading with a pen. Then Gradescope introduced AI-assisted grading. This feature automatically groups multiple choice questions by answer selection. Last spring, I graded 10 multiple choice questions for approximately 250 students in 15 minutes. The grouping feature can also be used manually, allowing the grader to group exam questions depending on what mistakes have been made. Once the answers are grouped, you only have to check off the rubric items once to grade all the answers!

If you are looking to use your time and energy as an instructor in more productive ways than flipping through stacks of paper, rewriting the same feedback over and over, or adding up scores by hand — I cannot recommend Gradescope enough!

Learn more about Gradescope and how it can help you streamline grading in your course.

I graded 2500 answers in 15 minutes, and so can you. was originally published in Gradescope Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.