Gradescope

Gradescope is an assessment and grading platform for instructors in schools and universities, run by Turnitin, LLC, whose name sits on the footer of both the homepage and the pricing page. The homepage says Gradescope helps instructors "administer and grade all of your assessments, whether online or in-class," and its promise is narrower than a full learning management system: take the assignments a course already uses, grade them faster and more consistently, return them with feedback, and see where students went wrong. It is built for the teaching staff of a course, from a single instructor to a team of graders, and for institutions that want to license it across departments.

What instructors grade with it

The homepage puts the claim plainly: "No need to alter your assignments. Grade paper-based, digital, and code assignments in half the time." It names four kinds of work, each with its own workflow.

Paper exams. Instructors scan student work and grade the scans. The site argues that scanning "saves time overall, prevents cheating, and frees your office of old exams."

Homework. Students upload PDFs or photos of their work, and the site says it supports variable-length assignments.

Code. Students can submit from GitHub and Bitbucket. Instructors can give immediate feedback through their own autograder, and can also grade code by hand with inline comments. A sample on the homepage shows an autograder score with its failed tests next to a separate manual grade for style.

Bubble sheets. The instructor creates an answer key with point values and partial credit for each question, scans a batch of sheets, and Gradescope separates them by test version and grades them against the key. The instructor confirms the marks, then sends grades out and views item analysis data.

The site describes two families of work it handles: variable-length assignments such as problem sets and projects, and fixed-template assignments such as worksheets, quizzes, bubble sheets and exams. The subjects it shows are computer science, physics, math, chemistry, biology, engineering and economics, each with a sample question and rubric credited to a named instructor.

Rubrics, feedback and answer groups

Every workflow runs through the same four steps: get the work in, grade submissions, send and export grades, then view per-question and per-rubric statistics. Grading is rubric-based. The homepage says instructors can "apply detailed feedback with just one click" and "make rubric changes that apply to previously graded work," so a rubric adjusted halfway through a stack updates the papers already marked. A New York University computer science instructor quoted there says it lets her "adjust scoring even after most of the exams have been graded."

Graded work can go back to students with a single click, which the site marks as optional, or the grades can be exported to the instructor's own gradebook. Regrade requests are handled online, which the site says frees up office hours. A Brown University math instructor quoted on the homepage says the regrade process "incentivizes carefully reviewing missed problems."

Answer groups let an instructor grade groups of similar answers at once. For some question types, the site says, "Gradescope AI automatically forms groups for you to review." A footnote on the homepage says answer groups and AI-assisted grading are part of the Institutional license, not the free plan. A San Francisco State University chemistry instructor quoted there describes grading 10 multiple choice questions for about 250 students in 15 minutes once the answers were grouped, and a University of Oklahoma math instructor describes an exam problem that would have taken an hour by hand taking 10 minutes with grouping.

Statistics

The fourth step of every workflow is analytics. Instructors get per-question and per-rubric statistics, and for bubble sheets item analysis data, and can export grades and data. A Florida Gulf Coast University math instructor quoted on the homepage says "The statistics really help me understand what I can teach differently next time to help my students learn better."

Plans and trial

The pricing page says "Gradescope offers two plans: Gradescope Basic and Gradescope Institutional." It prints no prices for either; for the Institutional plan it offers a contact form, asking for name, work email, job role, institution name, institution type (secondary education, higher education or other) and country.

Basic is free. It includes dynamic rubrics, question-by-question grading, basic assignment types (student-uploaded and instructor-uploaded PDF), assignment statistics, regrade requests, data export, the student mobile app and collaborative grading with multiple staff members.

Institutional adds AI-powered grading, AI-powered roster matching, anonymous grading, section management, the option to unpublish course grades, the additional assignment types (programming, online and bubble sheets), duplicate assignments, advanced rubric functionality (rubric item groups, import, and creating rubrics before submission), advanced annotation (text annotations and pencil colors), code similarity, lockable rubrics, duplicating a course, LMS integration, single sign-on, an administrator dashboard, and dedicated onboarding and training.

The trial terms are spelled out: "Try out the full set of features through an Institutional Trial for one term. After your Institutional Trial ends, you can continue using the Basic plan for free." An asterisk marks the last four Institutional items, LMS integration, single sign-on, the administrator dashboard, and dedicated onboarding and training, as "Not included in Institutional Trial," so a trial term shows the grading features but not the campus plumbing. The plan table names no specific LMS. For instructors who want the paid features, the pricing page suggests the Gradescope Advocate Program "to help secure an Institutional license for you and your colleagues." The login screen offers sign-in with an email and password, with school credentials or with Google.

Scale, people and support

The homepage gives four figures: 700M+ questions graded, 2,600+ universities, 140k+ instructors and 3.2M+ students, and the sign-up form is headed "Join Over 140,000 Instructors." Sign-up is split between instructors, who give their school, school website and email domain, and students, who join a course with a course entry code. The school categories on that form run from college and community college through high school, middle school and elementary school to extension schools and companies.

The site says its team "built Gradescope for ourselves while in grad school," and invites users to vote on the product roadmap. Support runs through a Help Center, video tutorials and a demo request. The pricing page is offered in English, German, Mexican Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese and Turkish.

Other instructors quoted on the homepage put numbers on the time saved. An economics instructor at the University of Chile says "What took me 2-3 hours, I can do now in 15 minutes." A Northwestern University computer science instructor says it lets him "give a short quiz every day in my section of 60 students, and grade them all on my 30 minute train ride home."

Who it suits

Gradescope fits courses where grading volume is the bottleneck: large lecture sections with paper midterms, problem-set courses in math and the sciences, and programming courses that already run autograders. The free Basic plan is enough for a single instructor or a small grading team working with PDF uploads, rubrics and statistics. Departments that grade bubble sheets, run code assignments, want answer groups and AI-assisted grading, or need anonymous grading and section management are looking at the Institutional plan, and a campus that needs LMS integration, single sign-on and an administrator dashboard should note that those four items only arrive with the license itself, not during the trial term.

It is a grading tool rather than a course platform. The pages describe no course builder, content hosting or course sales, so a creator selling courses or a training team assigning content will need something else, with Gradescope at most handling the marking.