De-Grading

An interesting article on outsourcing of grading drew my attention. (See below for That Term Paper Might be Graded in Bangalore - The Choice Blog - NYTimes.com)

Faculty members, especially at large institutions, are graded primarily on research. It is understandable that faculty members would want to minimize the time spent on teaching and grading. Large class sizes not only increase the workload but also the monotony. Outsourcing grading is perhaps better than giving multiple choice or T/F quizzes, as quite a few of my peers do. I am a professor of business at a liberal arts college, and I personally grade all assignments. Often I ask students to rework their assignments, and this increases my workload. Carefully constructed assignments reveal a lot about where the class stands on key concepts. We expect students to take personal responsibility for their learning- faculty should practice taking personal responsibility for all aspects of teaching, including grading. Teaching is a big responsibility as students are spending their most valuable resource, time, with the teacher. During the term I find teaching to be an all-consuming affair. Students should not be blamed for lackadaisical work, they often perform at the minimum level expected of them. Higher expectations get better results, both from teachers and from students.

Having just returned from India, I find it interesting that the class sizes there are significantly larger but I did not find professors there who outsourced grading to "locals."

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That Term Paper Might be Graded in Bangalore - The Choice Blog - NYTimes.com: "An article on the Web site of the Chronicle of Higher Education opens with the story of Lori Whisenant, a business professor at the University of Houston. The article says that Ms. Whisenant’s seven teaching assistants can’t process the hundreds of thousands of words being churned out each semester by her students.

And so, the reporter, Audrey Williams June, goes on to write, Ms. Whisenant “outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.” The story continues:

Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task — and even, the company says, to do it better than TA’s can.

The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary, because they are not juggling their own course work, too.

The company argues that professors freed from grading papers can spend more time teaching and doing research."