Colleagues:

A few of you either have asked me about, or I know are considering moving to the Gradescope Online Assessments as an option for your Final Exams.

 What follows below is not intended as a high quality full tutorial; regrettably I don't have time to put that together right now.

 Instead, it's "the best I can do in a few minutes", but it's "better than nothing"---and my hope is that it might be enough to let you know whether this is something you want to try.

 You may want to create a "practice exam" for your students that covers just the "mechanics of taking the exam" (not necessarily intended as a "review session" or a comprehensive sample final).

This could give both you and your students some measure of confidence that this is going to work.

Include one of each "type" of question (multiple choice, short answer, etc.) that you are going to include on the actual exam.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Phill

 

Here's how you create an online assignment (e.g. an online homework or online exam) in GradeScope:

 

1. Create a Gradescope account and a Gradescope course. I'm leaving out those steps: go to Gradescope.com and you can likely figure those out.
2. Once you are in your course, click Create Assignment

  

 

(Once you have an assignment, this is lower right on the Assignments page. It's one of the least intuitive parts of the User Interface.)

 

3. Select "Online Assignment" and click Next

 

4. Set the date time time the exam starts and ends.

 

I set this as the original start and end time of the exam, (e.g. noon to 3pm). I then clicked to allow "late submission" up to 3:01pm--this is to avoid dealing with the "professor, I lost track of time and forgot to hit submit". (More on my plan to deal with this below.)

 

Optionally, you can set a time limit, e.g. if you give the students any 2 hour period within a 24 hours period.

 

 

 

 

5. You are now ready to start entering your exam questions.

For formatting of the question text, you can use:

        Plain text

       Markdown (for bold, italics, code formatting, bullet lists and more) LaTeX notation (for Math notation

Here is an example.

 

 Note that:

• Using asterisks on successive lines makes a bullet list
• You edit on the left and see the formatted text on the right
• In markdown _underlines_ around a work produce italics
• And **double stars** around a work make it bold

 

(5) The most important part is to remember, in each question, that you need to include the special characters that provide a place for the students to answer the question.

 

The most common instructor error when making an online assessment in Gradescope is to forget to do this.

To put this in, there is a menu that looks like this:

 

That menu inserts the special characters you need for each of those options. They look like this:

 Short answer: 

[   ](answer)

 Free Response (essay type question):

[   ]

 Multiple Choice (one right answer, marked with x)

 ( ) choice

( ) another choice

(X) answer

 Select All (Multiple choice with more than one required correct answer, i.e. select all that apply):

[X] required choice [ ] another choice

[X] also required

 

How grading works:

            For Short answer, Multiple Choice Select all, the system automatically grades the student answers

            For free response, essay, you construct a rubric, and manually grade each student answer

Note that while multiple choice and select all autograding works great, short answer only works if there is one and only one correct way to express the answer.

 For example, if the question is "How many seasons are there" and the expected answer is "four", the answers "4" or "there are four" or "four: Winter, Summer, Spring, Fall" might all be marked "wrong".

 I don't know whether it's possible to leave that out, and then manually grade the answers. I have a question in to Gradescope tech support about that. I'll let you know what I hear back.

 So, a finished question looks like this: