The Gradescope pilot is available to all instructors for the 2023-2024 academic year. Gradescope is a platform for assignment and exam submission, grading, and analytics. It integrates with Canvas to facilitate the grading of hand-written assignments and problems and coding assignments. Interested in learning more? Attend a vendor-led training sessions on January 11, 2024, or during Keep Calm Teach On Winter 2024. Visit the Canvas@UD workshop calendar to register. Already tried it? If you have launched Gradescope as part of the pilot during Fall 2023, please complete the Gradescope Faculty Feedback Fall 2023 Survey. Your feedback is essential to the evaluation process!
As of mid-October, 321 catalog courses have created a Gradescope course associated with their Canvas course. Based on the self-selected department information, the departments with the most usage are STEM-related courses and the assignments are fixed length types which are generally used for printed exams where fixed areas are provided for responses.
 |
 |
But only about 20% of those courses have students and/or assignments. Although this can happen during a pilot when users click on a tool to explore, determining why activity did not continue after course creation may provide valuable feedback about the usefulness of the piloted tool. In order to demonstrate a broad usage of Gradescope to support adoption, we would like to see more activity with the tool and have some questions:
- If users created a Gradescope course, why are they not using it? Perhaps an instructor wanted to evaluate the tool and decided not to use it. But also it also could be the instructor was not sure why the tool might be useful. Gradescope is useful for grading assignments where students submit hand-written work – problem sets, quizzes, and exams. The student or the instructor can scan the work for submission. Students can scan their work and upload to an assignment in the same way as Canvas, but you have a more powerful rubric tool with an easy online interface that also allows for only-the-fly creation and feedback. You can also gain further insights into student performance using assignment statistics that are calculated at the question-level of your assignment.
- Is the new tool overwhelming for a beginning instructor? The tool does have a small learning curve, but try one test assignment and see how it works for you. If your students are already submitting work images to a Canvas assignment, create a Gradescope assignment and ask them to upload to Gradescope too so you have some content to test. Follow these steps and the Gradescope guides to get started.
- Create a new Gradescope course.
- Synchronize your roster to create student accounts.
- Create and link an assignment. Just use a blank page as the template if needed. Note: Canvas@UD is integrated with Gradescope LTI 1.3, so make sure to use the LTI 1.3 tab for correct steps. You can do this step in one of two ways: create the assignment in Gradescope and then one in Canvas and link to it or create an external tool type assignment in Canvas, choose the Gradescope tool and create the Gradescope assignment through the interface.
- Ask your students to submit.
- Are students having issues submitting assignments? Getting a pilot up and running often means some features may not be available at the start. At this time, Single Sign On (SSO) for the Gradescope mobile app is not available at UD, but UD IT is working on it. Until SSO is available, students can still use the mobile app if you ask them to follow these steps:
- Visit Gradescope through your Canvas course, select Account from the bottom left and choose Edit Account.
- On the displayed Account Settings page, enter a password. Students cannot choose the option at the bottom to link school credentials
- Download the app and launch.
- Select University of Delaware from the school list. Click the “Sign In” button, and choose to “sign in with email“. Use their UDEL e-mail and the password selected.
Where to go for help? We are learning too! Please e-mail canvas-info@udel.edu so that help can work through an issue with you. But if you need more immediate assistance, Use the Gradescope Help Center to find information and answers to frequently asked questions. If you have a specific question, Gradescope support can also help with any problems or questions you may have.
