From strategy to scale: How UCLouvain built the ideal hybrid evaluation model with Gradescope

UCLouvain pairs traditional exam methods with a modern tool that transforms grading into learning and streamlines educators’ work.

One of the biggest challenges of modern universities is to implement innovative technology without sacrificing well-established traditional practices. At Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium’s largest French-language university and one of the oldest universities in Europe, a growing number of educators are finding that a hybrid evaluation strategy delivers the best results.

UCLouvain educators have the resources to ensure assessment reliability. While there are multiple ways to evaluate student learning, UCLouvain students and teachers prefer the familiar format of handwritten, in-person exams. However, evaluating these submissions at scale posed significant challenges.

Challenge

Bringing evaluation efficiency to large courses

Many UCLouvain courses enroll over 100 students, and the numbers may soar higher in many courses.

“Sometimes we have exams with 500 students, and managing paper exams is extremely difficult, especially when there are multiple graders,” says Professor of Computer Science and Senior Advisor to the President for the Digital University Yves Deville. “There was also the difficulty of organizing feedback for students and managing evaluation criteria to ensure they remained uniform from the first copy to the last.”

These issues led to:

• Time-consuming administration hurdles: The team had to divide stacks of physical sheets so each teacher could grade on their own portion. Then, they would input information into a spreadsheet, which was later merged and calculated.
• Limited capacity for individual guidance: Grading handwritten exams took weeks, straining the faculty’s ability to provide the deep, personalized commentary essential to the learning journey.
• Delayed feedback: Students faced long waits for feedback, slowing their learning velocity.
• Subjectivity risks: Grading teams tried to implement a common grading rubric, but without objective oversight, interpretations varied. As a result, students could become concerned about fairness and bias.

Some courses came to rely solely on multiple-choice exams, diminishing assessment quality.

“We were forced to use multiple-choice questions with automatic grading because manual grading was too fastidious,” Yves explains.

Multiple-choice exams saved time but lacked the context and sophistication that accompanied open-ended questions.​

Solution

Aiding traditional evaluation with a modern tool

Grading frustrations at UCLouvain continued until a colleague introduced Yves to Gradescope by Turnitin.

Working with scans of handwritten exams, Gradescope offers collaborative rubrics, AI-assisted grading, and detailed analytics. These features streamline manual tasks and provide students with fast, fair, detailed feedback.

Ten UCLouvain educators engaged in a long-term trial of Gradescope. After a year, Yves was eager to expand the solution to the entire university.

“Once we used the tool, it was obvious it suited us,” he recalls.

Gradescope’s ease of use made it a natural fit. Yves and his colleagues launched an information campaign, including a product demo and a Q&A forum, in the university’s LMS. These resources were all that educators needed to see the benefits of Gradescope and incorporate it into their existing grading practices.

Results

Accelerating the feedback loop

UCLouvain quickly became a Gradescope super user. Today, around 2,000 educators have graded 700,000 exams and assignments across 3,500 courses. Instead of a top-down mandate, adoption was organic as educators shared their wins and experiences with each other.

“All the teachers who use Gradescope are delighted,” Yves says. “The most effective ad is the teacher telling a colleague, ‘I used it, it’s great.’”

Educators report that features like AI-assisted answer grouping help them grade more effectively in less time. Yves estimates that colleagues now deliver feedback 2–3x faster with Gradescope. In one case, Yves said, a colleague finished a 3.5-hour exam in a fraction of the time it would have normally taken.

“I think my colleagues would refuse to go back to not using Gradescope,” he adds. “It’s an indispensable tool that allows for the automation of handwritten exam grading.”

Collaborative excellence and evaluation consistency

Using Gradescope, grading teams can better coordinate their efforts, increasing efficiency.

Collaborative, dynamic rubrics let teams apply grading criteria consistently and adjust them when necessary. Yves experienced this firsthand when he realized midway through grading an exam that his rubric was too strict. By updating the rubric in Gradescope, he avoided having to redo any work.

“With Gradescope, you can change the criteria during the grading process, and that weighting is automatically applied to all the corrections already made,” he elaborates. “That’s a real plus and brings a new level of finesse to exam evaluations.”

Teams can also divide grading in new ways, such as grading a single question across all submissions. Yves notes that Gradescope’s “horizontal grading” is not only more efficient, but guarantees a higher level of equity and fairness for students—something that was impossible when working with traditional paper submissions.

Effective evaluations that inform instruction

By simplifying the evaluation of complex, open-ended questions, Gradescope helps UCLouvain transform grading into learning. While multiple-choice questions previously masked gaps in understanding, in-depth questions now reveal opportunities for more student support.

“With Gradescope, it’s possible to mix multiple-choice and ‘fast-grading’ open-ended questions, which is a more sophisticated form that allows for deeper student evaluations,” Yves explains.

For Yves, the most significant benefit is the platform’s downstream impact: better evaluations of student learning.

“The most important thing is having a higher quality of grading,” he says.

This matters because evaluations provide vital feedback to both instructors and their students, and greater insights help educators adjust and tailor their instruction to better meet students’ needs.

UCLouvain’s Gradescope experience demonstrates that technology in education doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It can support, rather than replace, traditional evaluation methods, providing educators and students with the desired experience and outcomes.

“We are talking about a hybrid assessment strategy, where we continue having handwritten exams and use modern tools to help. Gradescope is the ideal tool for that.”