Gradescope Instructor Information

Instructor grading with a laptop on their couch

Gradescope Instructor Information

UO has adopted Gradescope, a web platform to help instructors give better feedback and grade more efficiently!

Gradescope is now live at UO!

You can get started using it right now, though we recommend 
testing it out first before using it in an active CRN course.

Benefits  ·  Assignment Types  ·  How to Use  ·  Instructions For Your Students  ·  Pedagogy FAQ

What is Gradescope?

GradeScope is a web platform for grading student work, hopefully more efficiently than grading by hand or with Canvas's SpeedGrader. Both students and instructors can submit work to Gradescope for grading. For example,

  • students can upload problem sets (homework) to Gradescope as a single PDF or taking pictures of individual problems,
  • instructors can upload scans of students' paper exams to grade digitally,
  • students can take a picture of their daily in-class worksheet to submit in Gradescope,
  • instructors can replace Scantrons with Gradescope's bubble-sheet template for in class exams, or
  • students can create self-formed groups and submit group work just by adding group members' names to one submission.

These are just a few ways you can use Gradescope and assignment types you could grade with it. Check out how your assignments might work with Gradescope. Once you have an assignment in Gradescope, you can use Gradescope's grading tools to evaluate work. Stop carrying around a towering stack of handwritten exams, homework, poems, or worksheets—digitize them and grade them online from your couch! 

Gradescope and Canvas

Gradescope does not replace Canvas for your course. It is just an alternative platform for grading student work instead of using Canvas's SpeedGrader. Its grading tools offer much more flexibility and control for feedback and scoring student work than SpeedGrader has. The rest of your course - announcements, files, webpages, syllabus, etc. - will continue to exist in Canvas.

When you connect a Canvas assignment to Gradescope, Canvas shows students a link to go to Gradescope to submit the assignment. After you grade student submissions in Gradescope, you can easily export scores directly into your Canvas Gradebook for that assignment. When students want to see your feedback, they follow the assignment's Gradescope link to find your comments and scoring details.

What Do UO Faculty Say About Gradescope?

Dr. Andrea Goering, Physics

Gradescope will unlock the option for more frequent and rigorous in-person assessments in more of my large classes. I'm really excited about developing new handwritten class activities. When we're doing tasks involving spatial reasoning, graphical analysis, or thinking about processes, it will be great to ask students to draw and annotate instead of just answering multiple choice questions. It will provide me with more useful formative feedback about how students are thinking and provide them with more specific feedback than a multiple choice question can provide.
Find out more about using Gradescope for in-class, written work

Philip Matern, Human Physiology

Gradescope is a tool that allows me to do certain assessments in the classroom that I couldn't have done before.  It is especially helpful in my larger courses where I can speed up the grading process.  One of my favorite features is how you can group similar written answer responses, which speeds up the grading workflow and makes applying adjustments very easy.  The rubrics are very easy to create, edit, and apply while grading.  I also love that we can do bubble sheet grading without needing special expensive test sheets or a specialized scanner and software.  Overall, there are many features that help increase the speed and consistency in grading.
Find out more about how Gradescope can group answers, rubrics in Gradescope, or bubble sheets in Gradescope.

Learn about other benefits Gradescope can offer to you, your teaching team, and your students.

Getting Help with Gradescope

This site has a lot of information to help you.

UO Online and TEP are here to help you with aligning Gradescope with your teaching methods. We can help you think about what sort of assignments you could use with Gradescope, brainstorm new ways to use its tools, what tweaks you can make to assignments so they are easier to grade in Gradescope, etc. Reach out to us for support your work with Gradescope.

We may be able to help you set up some things in Gradecope, but UO doesn't have dedicated technical support for Gradescope.  For technical support, please see Gradescope's Instructor Guides or contact Gradescope directly.