Gradescope

As a grad student, I have multiple classes that I use grade scope for. However, since I took a class as a student that used grade scope, this app only lets me access that one student class and none of my classes as an instructor show up. I’m assuming there’s some security feature supposed to protect students from hacking and instructor account or something. I don’t know, but as an instructor this app is 100% useless. Using the website is fine, but if you want the convenience of an app, this is not the product I would choose.

As far as I can tell the biggest motive to get this is to directly upload work to gradescope without using an intermediary like adobe scan, but unfortunately the scanning functionality is very poor. It gets out of focus easily and there is no good way to make it refocus so it just stays out of focus until it wanders back into focus. It is also bad at picking up writing in various lighting conditions, so as far as I can tell this app is just a waste of time.

The actual UI isn't bad and the app is far easier to use than scanning a pdf and uploading on a PC, but the biggest issue with this app is that you end up going through numerous different login portals every time you open the app. If I want to submit an assignment, I need to first select what school I am attending in a super long list of schools, then I have to log in through my schools portal, and sometimes I get a 2FA prompt on top of that. Occasionally it just doesn't even work and I have to start from square one. Now this might be mildly annoying but it's really exacerbated by the fact that every time I need to upload an assignment I have to go through this process again. After spending several hours on an assignment it's so frustrating to have to browse through several menus just to upload a PDF. I get it's probably for security but I don't need NSA level protection for my PDF uploader. If someone really wanted to hack into my account and upload my homework for me so be it. If this issue was resolved I'd instantly give this app five stars because otherwise it's a great application.