A Game Changer for Grading
My Experience with Gradescope’s Grading Tool as a Teaching Assistant
By Aaron Barber, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | University of Michigan
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My initial experience with Gradescope was while I was an undergrad two years ago and was a TA for an upper-level Artificial Intelligence course. I had never heard of or worked with Gradescope before, but at the professor’s recommendation, I set it up for our course even after the course had started. It was the perfect grading tool for homework. For that AI course, we didn’t use Gradescope for exams (we didn’t want to scan all the handwritten exams), and the exam grading process was horrible (crumpled papers, massive stacks of exams, and a coordination nightmare between all of the TAs who graded). At that time, if I recall correctly, many courses in the computer science department at the University of Michigan were transitioning to use Gradescope for assignments and exams.
The following year, I was a TA for an intro programming course taken by all engineers at theUniversity of Michigan. We had 500+ students between all sections of the course, and we used Gradescope for parts of some homework assignments and for exam grading. Gradescope was the biggest game changer for exam grading. It reduced the grading process by hours, and it provided us with the ability to grade remotely (which for one exam allowed me to finish my portion of grading as I worked through the night at an airport).
While using Gradescope, I was impressed when the Gradescope support team reached out to offer me support without my prompting for help, and I was even more amazed at the speed in which they responded to answer my questions. It also seems that new features have continually been released since I first used Gradescope. It looks like the product is always improving, and I’m disappointed to not be teaching anymore to experiment with some of the new AI features. I think Gradescope has a really bright future and is an amazing tool for education.
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