Administration Guide

This article walks Brightspace administrators through the steps to connect a Brightspace instance to PaperScorer. Once these steps are complete, individual teachers at your institution can connect their own accounts.

For Brightspace administrators only. This article covers the initial Brightspace-side setup that an institution’s Brightspace administrator must complete. Individual teachers should see Connecting Your Account to Brightspace instead.

Step 1: Register the OAuth 2.0 Application in Brightspace

Sign in to your Brightspace admin account, click the cog wheel in the top navigation next to your user name, and select Manage Extensibility from the dropdown.

From the Manage Extensibility page, click the OAuth 2.0 sub-navigation option.

The OAuth 2.0 management page shows your registered applications. If you haven’t created any yet, the list will be empty. Click Register an app to begin.

You’ll be presented with a registration form.

Application Name (required): a descriptive name. Recommended: PaperScorer OAuth Connection.
Redirect URI (required): exactly https://app.paperscorer.com/brightspace/connect
Scope (required): exactly this list of scopes: enrollment:orgunit:read grades:gradeobjects:read grades:gradeobjects:write grades:gradevalues:write sections:own_section:read sections:section:read users:profile:read users:own_profile:read users:userdata:read
Access Token Lifetime (required): leave at the default 3600 seconds.
Description (optional): any internal note that helps you identify the application later.
Prompt for user consent (required): must be on.
Enable refresh tokens (required): must be on. PaperScorer relies on refresh tokens to maintain long-lived connections.
Accept the non-commercial development agreement (required): required by Brightspace to register an OAuth application.

Why these specific scopes? PaperScorer needs enrollment and users scopes to read class rosters, sections to handle multi-section courses, and grades:gradeobjects/gradevalues to create and grade assignments. Missing or extra scopes will cause connect or sync failures.

Click Register. Brightspace will save the application and show a confirmation page containing the Client ID and Client Secret — you’ll need both for Step 2.

NOTE: Brightspace only shows the Client Secret once. Copy it immediately and store it somewhere secure. If you lose it, you’ll need to regenerate the credentials and update the connection in PaperScorer.

Step 2: Add the Connection in PaperScorer

With the Client ID and Client Secret in hand, sign in to the PaperScorer web app. You’ll need a PaperScorer account to proceed.

NOTE: You do not need a Teacher Pro account to create or manage Brightspace connections — a free account is sufficient.

From any page in the PaperScorer app, click Connections in the main navigation.

On the Connections page, click Add connection.

Fill in the Add Connection modal:

Type (required): set to Brightspace.
Client domain (required): the Brightspace instance domain from Step 1. Don’t include http:// or https:// — just the host (e.g. paperscorer.d2l-partners.brightspace.com ).
Client ID (required): the Client ID from the registered OAuth 2.0 application.
Client Secret (required): the Client Secret from the registered OAuth 2.0 application.

After adding the connection, complete two final steps to activate it:

Activate the connection. Toggle the connection to its active state. You can toggle this off at any point in the future to immediately disconnect all your Brightspace users at once.
Verify the connection. This sends you through a quick sign-in flow against your Brightspace instance to confirm the credentials work. No session data is saved — PaperScorer just confirms the auth round-trip succeeds.

Once both steps are complete, individual users at your institution can connect their accounts and sync data between PaperScorer and Brightspace.

What Your Users Should Do Next

Your users can follow the Connecting Your Account to Brightspace walkthrough to link their personal accounts.

Troubleshooting

Users get an “invalid scope” error when connecting.

The OAuth application’s scope list doesn’t match what PaperScorer requests. Re-check the scope list in the OAuth 2.0 application against the exact list above — missing or extra scopes will both cause this error.

Users are redirected to a Brightspace error page after authorizing.

The Redirect URI on the OAuth application must match exactly — https://app.paperscorer.com/brightspace/connect with no trailing slash or other variations.

Users report that they were connected, then later disconnected unexpectedly.

Brightspace invalidates the refresh token on every use. PaperScorer normally rotates these correctly, but extended idle periods (multiple weeks) or token state being lost on PaperScorer’s side can force users to reconnect. This is normal Brightspace behavior — users just need to reconnect from their account page.

I need to rotate the Client Secret.

Regenerate the secret in Brightspace, then update the existing Brightspace connection in PaperScorer with the new value. Existing user connections continue to work as long as the active connection has valid credentials.