As the fall quarter begins winding down, Northwestern IT and the Office of the Registrar encourage instructors to try GradeSync, an opt-in grading tool now available in every Canvas course. Created by IT Teaching & Learning Technologies, GradeSync allows grades entered in Canvas to be sent directly to CAESAR with the push of a button.
To date, over 100 instructors have used GradeSync to submit 4,700+ individual grades to CAESAR. If you estimate that each grade would have taken about 20 seconds to enter using the traditional, manual process, using GradeSync saved about 26 hours worth of work. Using CAESAR, instructors choose each student’s letter grade, 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. GradeSync can also be used more than once throughout the grading period, allowing instructors to submit their grades in batches, or to make adjustments. CAESAR will always reflect the most recent GradeSync submission.
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.