What is Gradescope?

If you are picking a grading tool for a programming course and Gradescope keeps coming up, this post is for you. The short answer is that Gradescope is a strong grading platform with roots in handwritten and PDF work, and it can grade code too. Whether it is the right tool for your course depends on how much of the course is code and on how you want students to write and submit it. We will explain what Gradescope is, what it is good at, where it gets tricky for programming, and where a code-first alternative makes sense.

What Gradescope is

Gradescope started at UC Berkeley as a way to grade handwritten and PDF homework at scale. The product was acquired by Turnitin in 2018 and is now part of the Turnitin family. Today it covers four formats: handwritten and PDF homework, paper and online exams, programming assignments graded by an instructor-provided autograder, and bubble-sheet exams. You can sign up free for a single course. Full institutional deployments are sold to departments and campuses.

What Gradescope is good at

The PDF and handwritten grading workflow is what Gradescope is built for, and it shows. You scan student work, Gradescope groups identical answers together so you can grade a question once and apply the rubric across the batch, and students can request regrades inside the product. For mixed-format courses with a lot of exam grading or written homework, that workflow is a real time saver. Once an institution has rolled it out across many courses, the reporting and consistency across sections is another thing it does well.

Where Gradescope gets tricky for code

Gradescope grades code by running an instructor-provided Docker container. You build a Docker image with the test harness, package it as a zip, and upload it. That works, but it is engineering work, and iteration is slow if you need to tweak a test or change the runtime. There is no native code editor for students inside Gradescope. Students write code somewhere else and submit a file or a zip. LMS integration exists, but the day-to-day grading workflow lives in Gradescope, and the LMS is mostly a place to surface the final grade. Code plagiarism detection is not built in. Institutions that want code-similarity checks usually pair Gradescope with a second tool.

None of this is a knock on the platform. It is consistent with what Gradescope is for. It is just worth knowing if your course is mostly code.

Where CodeGrade is the better fit for code-first courses

CodeGrade was built for programming courses from the start. Three things tend to matter for instructors choosing between the two.

First, the free tier. CodeGrade is free up to 50 students per course, with no procurement cycle, so you can run a real assignment and see if the workflow fits before you spend institutional budget.

Second, the autograder. CodeGrade has a visual, block-based autograder where you build test steps directly: run a script, check output, score by rubric, give partial credit. You do not write a Docker image, and you do not zip and upload. When you need a change, you edit a step.

Third, the LMS and feedback experience. CodeGrade has native integrations with Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, and Brightspace, so students write code in a code editor inside the LMS, and instructors grade and leave inline feedback in the same place. JPlag-based plagiarism detection is built in. Peer feedback, where students review each other's code and you grade the quality of that feedback, is part of the product.

A simple decision rule

If your course is mostly handwritten or PDF work, or it is exam-heavy and you grade across many sections, Gradescope is built for that. If your course is mostly code, CodeGrade is built for that. If your program has both, use both. Gradescope for the PDF and exam stack, CodeGrade for the code stack. They sit side by side in the LMS.

How to evaluate without committing

Gradescope offers a single-course free path. Sign up and run one assignment to see whether the workflow saves you time on your real work. For CodeGrade, the free tier covers up to 50 students. Set up one programming assignment in your LMS, let students submit through the embedded editor, and check whether the autograder and feedback flow are what you want. Our comparisons/gradescope page has a feature-level head-to-head if you want the detail.

Start free. Free for courses up to 50 students. No trial, no expiration.

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