There are many unexpected situations that might impact the grading burden of prelim and final exams.  Some of these can be planned for, but at times situations may arise that might require a quick change in a final from how it was originally planned. There are a number of tools that can be used that may help ease the stress of these situations. Strategies for Keeping Grading Manageable has some general guidelines to help. 

Canvas has two built-in quizzing tools, New Quizzes and Classic Quizzes, that offer the following available auto-grading features:

• New Quizzes: Categorization, Fill in the Blank, Formula, Hot Spot, Matching, Multiple Answer, Multiple Choice, Numeric, Ordering, and True or False
• Classic Quizzes: Multiple Choice, True/False, Fill-in-the-Blank, Fill-in-Multiple-Blanks, Multiple Answers. Multiple Drop-down, Matching, Numerical Answer, Simple Formula, and Single Variable Formula

Gradescope, a tool that integrates with Canvas but can be used independently, has a number of features and assignment types that can help ease some of the challenges of grading a very large number of assignments or exams. 

• Some of these features include:

  • AI-Assisted grading. Gradescope will not automatically grade for you, but it can automatically group similar answers together so they can be graded in bulk.
  • Fully anonymous grading. TAs will not be able to see who they are grading. This feature works for almost all of Gradescope’s assignment types including handwritten assignments.
  • Bubble sheet exams. Gradescope provides a bubble sheet for students to fill out if your exam is entirely multiple choice. This option functions similarly to using a Scantron. The difference is that, with Gradescope, the bubble sheets are scanned to create a PDF and uploaded into Gradescope for assessment. 
  • Fully online exams and quizzes. The question types can be mixed and matched so that multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank questions are automatically graded while short answer questions are manually graded.

• More details, including tutorials on how to use Gradescope, can be found on our Gradescope help page.