Gradescope

Gradescope was built by PhD students at UC Berkeley who were tired of the inefficiency and inconsistency of grading paper exams and programming assignments at scale. Founded in 2014, the platform lets instructors scan paper submissions for AI-assisted grouping of similar answers, grade one question across all students at once, and apply rubric changes retroactively to every submission simultaneously. Turnitin acquired Gradescope in 2018, adding academic integrity resources from the parent company's existing infrastructure. The platform is widely used in STEM courses at universities and increasingly in high schools.

The workflow centres on the assignment — instructors create an assignment, define a rubric, and either upload student submissions or have students submit digitally. For handwritten exams, the AI groups similar responses to the same question so the grader can apply a rubric item once and watch it propagate to all matching answers. For programming assignments, autograding runs submitted code against test cases automatically. Students receive digital feedback on their annotated submission and can request a regrade directly through the platform within a defined window.

When Gradescope has problems, the timing often compounds the frustration because grading deadlines are tied to grade reporting cycles. Submission upload fails when instructors try to import scanned exams — large PDF batches time out or return server errors during backend processing. Autograding jobs queue but never execute, leaving programming assignment results in a pending state as the deadline approaches. Students attempting to view their graded feedback find the submission viewer returning an error or showing a blank page. Regrade requests submitted by students fail to save, and instructors attempting to publish grades find the grade release workflow unresponsive.

Outage.gg tracks Gradescope platform status using real-time community reports from instructors and students. If submissions are not uploading, autograding is stuck, or grades cannot be published, the live status page shows current impact.