Exciting updates in Gradescope and a new way to strengthen assessment integrity

The core of Gradescope by Turnitin’s product philosophy is to develop features and tools that help make grading and managing courses a delight for instructors and students. That has certainly been the theme of our recent enhancements, which combine assessment integrity with smart tools and flexibility to fit your needs. With that said, we’d like to share with you these updates.

Up until now, students were required to scan their work on external scanners or copiers in order to upload it to Gradescope. This was quite inconvenient for students, as not every student has easy access to a scanner; moreover, scanners can sometimes be confusing or cumbersome to use. More concerningly, using a third-party app to scan in student work could potentially compromise privacy and create headaches for instructors being asked to troubleshoot scanning and uploading issues. That’s why we’re so excited to announce the release of a new Gradescope student mobile app which allows students to upload work to Gradescope directly from their phone, safely and securely. With the Gradescope mobile app, students can easily submit their assignment with confidence. Submitting work is now as simple as taking a picture or selecting a file on your phone and uploading it to the appropriate assignment. Students in the United States can download the free app on the App Store or Google Play as of April 2022, and it will be available to the rest of the world in July 2022.

Note: The app is only for students to upload submissions and view grades (not feedback). Some assignment types require students to access Gradescope in a browser. You can read more about it in our Help Center.

Gradescope’s dynamic rubrics provide instructors with the massive benefit of building and adapting rubrics while grading, providing detailed feedback, and defining scoring on the fly. But sometimes, instructors want to build their rubrics while creating an assignment. Now instructors can choose to create a rubric for any question prior to receiving submissions. This gives additional flexibility to those who know their scoring system and criteria prior to grading. It can also offer better insight to teaching assistants or graders that need to be familiar with the instructor-approved rubrics prior to getting started on grading.

This functionality is completely flexible, instructors can create all or some of their rubrics ahead of time to speed up grading, or build what they know and modify later with the traditional “dynamic” rubric functionality. Even when “Before student submission” is enabled, rubrics remain dynamic and editable as instructors grade.

It’s easy and often tempting for students to share answers on online assignments when their questions and answer choices are identical to the student next to them or the answer key posted online. Instructors can now uphold integrity for online assignments with question and answer choice randomization. This feature shuffles the order of questions and answers for all students.

We often get requests from instructors to remove students’ access to their grades, feedback, and rubrics from courses in previous terms. To make it easier for instructors to manage their courses, we recently launched a button allowing instructors to ”Unpublish All Grades” in the Course Settings page. This will remove students' access to grades, feedback, and rubrics. Removing access prevents students from one term from sharing course details with a student from another term. This helps to uphold assessment integrity and protect an instructor’ s hard work developing a course, grading student work, and providing actionable feedback for each student.

We are continuing to develop exciting features for Gradescope. Here are a few things that will be available soon for our customers. Be sure to let us know what’s important to you by visiting and upvoting features on our Gradescope Roadmap on Trello.

• More Languages - We’re adding more languages to Gradescope. In May, we launched Portuguese (Brazilian) and are planning to release French (Canadian) and German in 2022.
• Managing Course Sections - Course sections will allow instructors of large courses to manage different sections within Gradescope without having to create multiple assignments or courses.

At Gradescope by Turnitin, our goal is to help instructors have greater flexibility in the way they approach assessments and uphold integrity with the work they put into their courses.