Students can submit a PDF or take pictures of their work using Gradescope's app. Faculty can also submit student work, for example by scanning and uploading students' paper exams. Once assignments are in Gradescope, you can use its tools to grade them!

Gradescope has a range of grading tools that allow for strong and clear feedback to students and more efficient grading by the instructor. Gradescope claims most instructors say Gradescope reduces their grading time by 30-60%, compared to grading on paper. Some of these tools allow you to

• Build Flexible Rubrics - Canvas's SpeedGrader limits you to one grid-based rubric for an entire assignment. Gradescope can do this, but also go farther with more flexible rubrics that, for example, let you take away points for individual mistakes or give points for specific ideas that appear in an answer.
• Use a Rubric for each Question - Some assignment types in Gradescope let you list individual questions to add to each assignment. Each of these questions has their own rubric to use while grading.
• Use Dynamic Rubrics - You can modify a rubric as you grade or even start grading with no rubric and design it as you go.
• Reuse Comments - unlike Canvas's Gradebook, each assignment in Gradescope has its own comment bank. You won't see comments from exam 1 while you grade exam 2. You can, though, import rubrics between assignments to reuse rules and notes in the rubrics.
• Update Scoring Rules - If you change how many points a rubric item is worth part way through grading, Gradescope automatically updates the score for all past students. You don't have to search for the two students you graded 2 hours ago who made the same mistake.
• Grade Horizontally - Truly grade question-by-question. Want to just grade question 4 for all students? Gradescope won't even show you responses for questions 1, 2 or 3. You will just flip through student responses to question 4.
• Link Feedback & Grading - For each comment you leave on a student's work, you can (but don't have to) tag it to a rubric item. This can help reveal to students exactly how that comment impacted their scores.
• Group Matching Student Answers - for fill-in-the-blank questions or some multiple choice question styles, Gradescope can read student responses and group together students who answered the same thing. When you grade these questions, you only need to give a score and feedback for each answer group, not for every student. 

Gradescope connects to Canvas for you import student grades into your Canvas Gradebook. Gradescope can show you statistics to understand student performance on a whole assignment or on individual questions, including how often (and for which students) you used specific feedback.

When teaching as a team, Gradescope can help keep you aligned in your grading and help spread the work out between team members.

• Use Shared Rubrics - If you build rubrics for a question or assignment before grading starts, the whole team can use the rubric as they grad to keep grading consistent. If a new rule gets added, everyone on the team sees it and can use it.
• Easily Distribute Work by Section - You can arrange your students into groups in Gradescope, and then assign different graders for different groups. For example, if you have discussion sections, group students by discussion section in Gradescope. Then team members can grade work from only students in their section(s).
• Easily Distribute Work by Question - Assign one team member to grade specific questions on an assignment for all students. Gradescope can show only that question response for all students and allows the grader to focus on just that element (this is called horizontal grading). This helps keep grading consistent across students. It saves time but not forcing graders to find their assigned question out of many. It lets graders work at the same time as they do not have to share one paper copy of the exam.

In addition to helping graders, there are benefits to your students when you use Gradescope.

• Faster Turn Around Time - More efficient grading means students get feedback faster. Faster feedback means students may be more likely to act on your feedback for their next assignment. It also helps students understand the feedback as their own work will be fresher in their memories when they review what you have to say.
• Clearer relationship between feedback and grade implications - Linking your comments to grading rules in your rubric lets students can directly that specific comments added to, or penalized, their score for a question.
• Less juggling paper - Students don't have to staple and hand in stacks of paper - and hope you don't lose it! They also don't have to worry about collecting papers - Gradescope, because all work is digitized, shows students a copy of their work directly with your feedback.
• Easy to request regrades - If you turn on the setting, students can request you regrade a portion of an assignment with a simple click of a button. You reply to their request directly in GradeScope, updating their score if warranted. This is all done in Gradescope, no long email threads to keep track of.