Northwestern IT and the Office of the Registrar are pleased to announce that GradeSync is now available in every Canvas course. GradeSync is an opt-in grading tool created by Teaching & Learning Technologies that allows faculty to send grades entered in Canvas directly to CAESAR with the push of a button.
Twenty-one faculty across 30 separate courses piloted GradeSync during the recent Fall and Winter quarters, for approximately 1,414 student grades. GradeSync conservatively saved those instructors 6 to 12 hours of time that was usually spent choosing each student’s letter grade in CAESAR, one by one. As you can imagine, for an instructor with a large class or with multiple sections in CAESAR, that process could be both painstaking and error-prone – until now.
Sara Sood, Associate Professor of Instruction in the McCormick School of Engineering, found GradeSync to be a hugely beneficial tool, “It [GradeSync] cuts down on errors when entering final grades and also saves you a great deal of the time it would normally take to enter them. My classes range in size from 200-400 students so manually entering grades one by one was not an ideal workflow. I definitely recommend that my colleagues give it a try.”
Instructors have the option to review and modify grades before sending them to CAESAR. Instructors can use GradeSync more than once throughout the grading period, as well, allowing instructors to submit their grades in batches, or to make adjustments. CAESAR will always reflect the most recent GradeSync submission by an instructor.
Get Started
To start using GradeSync today, follow these steps on the GradeSync page located in the Canvas Resource Hub. You’ll first need to add or create a grading scheme for your course, then enable the integration from the course Settings area under Navigation. Once enabled, only instructors can see the GradeSync tab.
Caveats:
- GradeSync is not for use in Northwestern Pritzker School of Law classes at this time.
- GradeSync will not work in courses with manually enrolled students. Course enrollment must come directly from CAESAR. Contact nu-grades@northwestern.edu or call 847-467-0760 with questions or to report discrepancies between the grade roster and the list of students attending the class.