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Gradescope by Turnitin


For professors looking to administer in-person, paper-based exams, Gradescope provides a way to streamline the grading process. At NYU, Gradescope is available as a third party integration. It was designed to address testing challenges such as:


  • Time-consuming grading of written exams

  • Fatigue from grading assessments for large student rosters

  • Risk of bias and leniency in grading

  • Inconsistent qualitative feedback

  • Grading errors


Exam Administration Formats


If an exam is printed and administered to students, the exams need to be collected, scanned, and uploaded to the Gradescope platform. Gradescope detects short-answer written response regions on written assessments for the professor to grade. Students’ responses are not automatically graded. 


If an online exam is created using the Gradescope tool and administered to students, multiple choice responses can be automatically graded. 


Gradescope is optimized for the following question types:


  • Numerical calculations

  • Equations

  • Formulas

  • Diagrams

  • Fill-in-the-blanks

  • True or false

  • Multiple choice selections, including bubble sheets

  • Short answers

  • Coding


Gradescope is not intended for open-ended essays, compositions, multi-paragraph responses, or multimedia projects.



Key Features & Uses


  1. Professor-Graded Scanned Written Exams


    After paper exams are collected and scanned into Gradescope, optical character recognition (OCR) technology is used to group students' responses by exam question. Although Gradescope does not automatically score student answers, it reorganizes the process of grading from traditional student-by-student grading to question-by-question grading (“vertical grading”). To enhance grading efficiency and consistency, Gradescope includes features for:



Example Use: Global Business Economics Written Final Exam


Professor-graded scanned written exams might be useful for grading a large stack of final exams, such as in a Global Business Economics course. This example includes response region detection “outlining” (in green) for multiple choice questions:



  1. Auto-Graded Online Assessments


    Gradescope allows professors to create automatically-graded online assessments that include short answers such as calculations and multiple-choice selections. It has an option for automated feedback for correct and incorrect answers. 


    “Free responses” to online assessment questions can be included but are not auto-scored; rather they must be graded individually by the professor. Gradescope also encourages professors to vet each student’s auto-generated score. 


    Overall, the online assessment functionality is comparable to the NYU Brightspace Quizzes tool (NYU login required).


Example Use: Weekly Multiple Choice Quizzes


Automated grading with optional feedback can be useful as student comprehension checks after a set of readings or lectures. These checks might take the form of a 10-question quiz that include short answers, multiple choice questions, and true-false questions.



Additional Features of Gradescope




How to get started using Gradescope in your course


To add Gradescope to your NYU Brightspace course site, follow the steps in this NYU IT Knowledge Base article (NYU login required).


To view Gradescope product demonstrations, access their step-by-step “Getting Started” video tutorials and Gradescope how-to guides. For answers to frequently asked questions, check out the Gradescope help page.

 
 
 
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