In this list of assignment types, each link jumps to information about how Gradescope could be used to support that assignment type. If you don't see a type of assignment you use, reach out to us to collaborate on how you could use Gradescope for that assignment!

For assignment types items marked with an asterisk (*), Gradescope may not be a useful platform. Notes about why Gradescope may not be a good choice are given in the table and some offer ideas for how you could use Gradescope even if it might be a little cumbersome. If you experiment and find a good way to use Gradescope for one of them, please reach out and let us know! We'd be thrilled to update our information with faculty ideas!

Assignment Types

For an exam, you can scan and upload your students' exams to quickly digitize them for grading. Gradescope can identify student names and link their exams to them. In addition to giving you access to its grading tools, here are other ways Gradescpoe can useful for exams.

• You can upload exams in a batch - a stack of exams scanned into one document. Gradescope will separate them into individual exams for you. It will even read handwritten names and match them to your roster.
• After grading, Gradescope will sum scores for you, and you can import results directly to Canvas.
• There's no papers to return! Students can review their results (and see their exam) directly in Gradescope.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Exam/Quiz assignment format. This sets it up so only you can upload submissions. It also lets you mark up a blank version of your exam so that Gradescope knows where to look for student answers for each question after you upload student exams.

Gradescope has its own bubble sheet that you can download and print to replace Scantrons. The bubble sheet fits onto standard letter-sized (8.5"×11") paper. After the exam, you just need scan the completed bubble sheets and upload them to Gradescope. Gradescope can then auto-grade the bubble-sheets and match them to student names.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Bubble Sheet assignment format. This lets you upload completed sheets and have Gradescope automatically grade them for you.

You could use these for higher-stakes quizzes/exams or for lower-stakes formative assessments (e.g. homework or reading checks). Gradescope offers Online Assignments that students answer directly in the Gradescope platform (rather than answering them in Canvas). 

Also, do note that Gradescope does not have any additional security or academic integrity features compared to Canvas.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Online Assignments format. Note that these are in still being tested by Gradescope (current in beta), so they could have some issues. 

If you are concerned about the susceptibility of Canvas Quizzes to generative AI, you could move toward in-person exams/quizzes or handwritten homework. See the entries on in-person exams and quizzes or homework for more information about how Gradescope can support those formats.

In addition to giving you access to its grading tools, here are other ways Gradescpoe can useful for in-class work.

• Students can use the Gradecope App to take a picture of their in-class work and submit it to a Gradescope assignment. Use it to record reflections they've quickly written in their notes, answers they've given on a worksheet, sketches they made in studio, calculations they did on a whiteboard, annotations they've added to handouts, and more.
• If students work in groups, they can add their group members name to their submission to submit a group assignment. Your grading and feedback will be shown to all students - without you needing to set up groups for students.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Homework/Problem Set assignment format. This lets students upload their own work.

In addition to giving you access to its grading tools, here are other ways Gradescpoe can useful for labs.

• Students can upload their work directly to Gradescope. They can upload a pdf from a web browser or take pictures of their work with Gradescope's App on a tablet or cell phone.
• If students work in groups, they can add their group members' names to their submission to submit a group assignment. Your scoring and feedback will be given to all students in the group.
  • You do not need to pre-form groups for students in Gradescope. Students can add group members themselves based on who they worked with that day. This can help when students are absent, visiting another lab session if they cannot make theirs, or are doing make-up labs after missing one.
• There's no paper to juggle. You don't have to carry around a stack of papers or try to return written homework to students.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Which assignment format works best in Gradescope depends on what sort of submission students do for their lab.

• If students are submitting their lab manual or instructions with their answers filled in, try using the Homework/Problem Set assignment format set up as a fixed length assignment. This lets students upload their own work. When you give Gradescope a copy of the blank manual/instructions, it can easily identify where students have written in their answers in each submission so you can grade question-by-question easily.
• If students submit answers to questions spread throughout the lab instructions (but have no formal structure to fill in answers), try using the Homework/Problem Set assignment format set up as a variable length assignment. This lets students upload their own work and asks them to identify where they've given the answer to each question in their submission. 
• If students submit journal entries about their lab experience, try using the Homework/Problem Set assignment format set up as a variable length assignment. This lets students upload their own work. Each lab assignment in Gradescope could just be one question for students to upload an image (or pdf if the journal is digital) with their answer. If there are multiple questions that students journal about, there could be multiple questions in the assignment and students would submit their reflection to each question individually.
• If students submit a longer description of their lab work, such as a lab report, try using the Homework/Problem Set assignment format set up as a variable length assignment. This lets students upload their own work. See the section on essays and lab reports for more ideas.

Do remember that Gradescope can only accept images or PDFs for these formats. If you want students to upload other file formats, such as spreadsheets with collected data, you may want to stick to submitting these assignments in Canvas. If having the data submitted in a spreadsheet file is not critical for assignment, students could submit it as a PDF through Gradescope.

Gradescope might not be the best platform for grading these types of "live" assignments because Gradescope needs a PDF or image to be submitted for an assignment. If you still wanted to use Gradescope's grading tools, you could have students submit something related to their assignment. For example, they could submit slides they used in their presentation, citation list for their work, a description of the motivation for their dance routine, or a reflection on success or struggles they had while preparing.

In addition to giving you access to its grading tools, here are other ways Gradescpoe can useful for if you use it for presentations or performances.

• If students work in groups, they can add their group members' names to their submission to submit a group assignment. Your scoring and feedback will be given to all students in the group.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Homework/Problem Set assignment format. This lets students upload their own work. If they submit before their presentation/performance, you can use Gradescope's rubric tools to grade their work as they present/perform. You can also include their submitted work in your grading rubric if you wish.

Gradescope is not a beneficial tool for quick, in-class polling. Submitting work to Gradescope, grading it, and sharing results with students is much slower in Gradescope than it is for iClicker or similar platforms. 

Gradescope is probably not the right tool for grading or tracking student participation in discussions as it requires a PDF or images to be submitted for grading. This may be challenging to grade this kind of in-the-moment student engagement that is needed for grading or tracking participation. 

If you added a small writing component to your discussions (for example, to help everyone to organize their thoughts before speaking or to use as an end-of-class reflection), you could have students submit their written work through Gradescope. You could use these submissions to manage participation but would evaluate students after class rather than evaluating them during the discussion.

In addition to giving you access to its grading tools, here are other ways Gradescpoe can useful for homework and problem sets.

• Students can upload homework directly into Gradescope. They can upload a pdf from a web browser or take pictures of their work with Gradescope's App on a tablet or cell phone.
• There's no paper to juggle. You don't have to carry around a stack of papers or try to return written homework to students.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Homework/Problem Set assignment format. This lets students upload their own work and identify where they've given the answer to each question.

If you use Canvas Quizzes for homework, see the section above on Canvas Quizzes.

In addition to giving you access to its grading tools, here are other ways Gradescpoe can useful for essays and other longer writing works.

• Students can submit their work (as a pdf) directly to Gradescope, rather than to Canvas or submitting a paper copy. This lets you use Gradescope's grading tools for the essay.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Homework/Problem Set assignment format. This lets students upload their own work. If you want to grade the whole assignment with one rubric, have just one "question" in the problem set. If you want a rubric for different sections (for example, if you want to use different rubrics for their paper and its citations or if you want a different rubric for each section of a lab report), have a different "question" for each section to you want to score separately.

In addition to giving you access to its grading tools, here are other ways Gradescpoe can useful for projects.

• If the project can be submitted as a PDF (for example, slides or a poster) or as an image, students can submit their work directly to Gradescope for grading.
• If the project cannot be turned into a PDF/image, you could still use Gradescope's grading tools for the project if you have students submit something related to the project, for example a reflection on their work. Your grading in Gradescope could be tied to the rest of the project, rather than the submission (or your grading rubric could address both!).
• If students work in groups, they can add their group members name to their submission to submit a group assignment. Your grading and feedback will be shown to all students.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Homework/Problem Set assignment format. This lets students upload their own work.

Gradescope can grade programming assignments! This format can do some auto-grading of student work and it even check how similar students' code is to each other.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Programming assignment format. There are multiple ways that students can submit code to Gradescope, including via GitHub.

Gradescope needs a PDF or image to be submitted for an assignment, so you will have to have students submit something related to their assignment in Gradescope. For example, they could submit a transcript of their podcast episode, a photograph of their ceramics piece, citation list for their work, a reflection on what they struggled with when making their architecture model, a youtube link to their short documentary, an example gallery placard for their painting, annotated sheet music for the violin piece they recorded, or a photo of a ball-and-stick model of glycerol they made during class.

In addition to giving you access to its grading tools, here are other ways Gradescpoe can useful for recordings or physical objects.

• If students work in groups, they can add their group members' names to their submission to submit a group assignment. Your scoring and feedback will be given to all students in the group.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Homework/Problem Set assignment format. This lets students upload their own work for you to grade. Your rubric in Gradescope could be based on just the external work (video/audio/object) or could include assessment of their digital submission to Gradescope.

Gradescope is not a particularly good replacement for surveys in Canvas. In Canvas, surveys can give students credit just for completing them; no other action by an instructor member is needed. Assignments in Gradescope must be graded manually by an instructor (some question types in Online assignments can be auto-graded). 

• If you wanted to use the grading tools of Gradescope for a survey, your grading rubric could have just one item: completed. You would have to manually go through each submission to mark it as complete, but then would be able to give feedback with Canvas's grading tools.

Which Gradescope assignment format should I use?

Try using the Online Assignments format or the Homework/Problem Set assignment format. Both let students enter or upload their own work. The Online assignments format lets students enter answers directly into Gradescope (just like Canvas Surveys). The Homework/Problem set format requires students to upload a PDF or take a picture of hand written answers to submit.

Gradescope is not a useful tool for organizing peer feedback as it does not have a feature to allow students to see or comment on each other's work. 

Gradescope is not a good alternative for discussion boards because it does not have a way for students to see each other's work.