You may have heard the term ‘Gradescope’ particularly in the context of exams. This Turnitin-owned tool was used by a number of Schools for some of their exams during the pandemic in 2020, but it can offer so much more to assessment practices than just being used with exams.
Gradescope is an assessment tool which allows students to scan and upload handwritten work into their assignment. These questions can then be marked with greater efficiency, using a dynamic rubric whilst marking per question and with machine learning collating similar answers for more efficient marking.
The obvious applications might be courses that use notation, such as maths and economics. Indeed, we have colleagues in maths who are successfully using the tool. We are currently looking for colleagues from other subject areas to trial the tool and benefit from its features – non-Roman script languages (e.g. Japanese, Arabic), for example, where work might be better handwritten. Gradescope also assists team-marking with simultaneous marking of a paper using the mark per question interface.
We are hoping that Gradescope can mean more than just marking exams and provide a choice for a range for assessments. We are working with a number of colleagues in different departments to implement the tool into their Autumn Term Assessment. If this sounds like it might benefit you, we are still looking for colleagues across the University who might be willing to trial Gradescope in one piece of coursework over the coming year.
Benefits include:
- Horizontal marking workflows (marking each question across all students and proceeding to the next)
- Machine learning (AI) clustering, that reads and groups student answers, such as formulae, diagrams, calculations or characters, to allow bulk marking
- Flexible and adaptable marking rubrics that can be expanded and adjusted during marking
- Organisation of scanned papers into an online submission, including bubble answer sheets or scanned PDFs.
If these features are something which you might be interested in using, please email us at dts@reading.ac.uk with the subject ‘Gradescope’.
Please see our Gradescope Project page for further details and specific case studies.