Effective, efficient assessments at The University of Texas at Austin

Meet Jen

Jen Moon is a full professor of instruction in the departments of Biology and Molecular Biosciences at UT Austin. She sits on the Technology Enhanced Education Oversight Committee, which evaluates and formulates policy on technology-enhanced education for faculty campus-wide.

Class volume challenges timely, tailored feedback

As an instructor, Dr. Moon wanted to design her assessments so she could better understand how students are developing their skills in her courses. For her, and for many of her colleagues, this meant asking free response questions, but this approach wasn’t always feasible.

She noted: “Grading free responses can be intensely time consuming, but very revealing, and wouldn’t be too much of a challenge with a small class. However, many of our courses have large enrollments. My largest course was over 200 students.”

She regularly came up against the challenge of administering and grading exams for large classes, sometimes managing as many as 300 students per semester as a standard workload. More students meant less opportunity to provide detailed and customized feedback.

To tackle this amount of grading, multiple graders were a must. Dr. Moon then encountered another challenge as a result of employing multiple graders—short answer exams were difficult to grade consistently.

Beyond managing volume, Dr. Moon also noticed that she had no way to efficiently track performance of any particular class or any specific student in a nuanced and granular way. She wanted to apply a “backwards design” framework to her courses—first identifying learning objectives, then assessments written to support those objectives—but she had to manually keep track of each student’s performance on each question in spreadsheets.

"One of the issues with [backwards course design] is that I need to get data about how students are performing on particular learning objectives from a regular pen and paper exam. It's a lot of manual labor to do that."

—Jen Moon, UT Austin

For Dr. Moon and her team of graders, the cost of these inefficiencies were time and opportunity. Time spent on the logistics of grading, and opportunity in the form of students not being able to get timely and beneficial feedback on exams.

Grading efficiency & consistency leads to greater student learning outcomes

Dr. Moon knew they “needed a way to consistently and fairly grade a large number of short answer exams, with helpful feedback for students, and in a short time window.” And that they “also wanted metrics on how students were performing on particular learning objectives.”

After hearing about Gradescope from a colleague, Dr. Moon adopted the tool mid-semester to solve her challenges, and has “never looked back.” For her, Gradescope provided the most features to help with time and opportunity challenges.

Dynamic rubrics and the ability to assign specific sections of grading to multiple graders helped to systematize and streamline the grading process. Multiple graders could grade remotely at the same time, Dr. Moon could see live updates of their progress, and grouping questions allowed multiple student answers to be graded in batches. The team also found great value from the AI grading support that automatically graded selected sections of the assessment. These capabilities helped to drastically reduce time spent grading, so students could get feedback faster.

With this additional time back, Dr. Moon reallocated her efforts to resolving the student opportunity challenge she sought to remedy. She could now hand back exams almost instantly and provide personal and specific feedback to each student. Because she could now work with individual and class-level data, Dr. Moon was also able to implement her “backwards design” approach to tracking student performance. By tagging assessment questions with learning objectives, she could track and visualize student learning gains throughout her course. She was able to identify and revisit concepts that the class struggled with, and turn a critical eye to her lesson plans to make adjustments that immediately supported student learning and her course design.

"I was able to use the data I got from Gradescope to give students specific feedback on performance. Several low performing students on Exam 1 made substantial improvements on Exam 2."

—Jen Moon, UT Austin

A game-changing solution for UT Austin

The University of Texas at Austin partnered with Gradescope to undergo two pilot trials to evaluate its effectiveness in addressing their needs. It first began at the course level, then soon grew into the entire College of Natural Sciences.

Because the pilot was an overwhelming success and instructor demand increased, UT Austin decided to adopt Gradescope in additional departments like Biology, Molecular Biosciences, Chemistry, Computer Science, ECE, Math, Marine Science, Electrical Engineering, Management, Linguistics, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, and Data Science. There are currently ~200 instructors using Gradescope in ~160 courses, making a difference for ~13,000 students.

Dr. Moon has called Gradescope a “game changer,” stating that her stress levels around exams are significantly reduced. She was surprised when her multiple graders claimed that grading is “so much fun” now—something she never expected to hear. Her students have also reported that they “were delighted with the speedy return of their exams and the clarity of the feedback.” Since she started with Gradescope, Dr. Moon said she has never looked back, and hasn’ t given a non-Gradescope exam since then.