I had meant to post this earlier because this Chronicle of Higher Education article was the subject of some debate on one of the mailing lists I’m on, but I got busy with my day-job (some of it involving grading, ironically enough) and my new iPad (perhaps the subject of an upcoming post as well). Then this morning, a colleague and alert EMUTalk.org reader reminded me of this article, “Some Papers Are Uploaded to Bangalore to Be Graded,” and I was told that “dude, you need to post this.” So here it is.
Here are a couple of quotes; first, the opening paragraphs:
Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.
Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn’t deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. “Our graders were great,” she says, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.”
That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.
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.
And then this one from the end, because it kind of pissed me off:
EduMetry’s Mr. Rajam hopes that more colleges will see these benefits.
“People need to get past thinking that grading must be done by the people who are teaching,” says Mr. Rajam, who is director of assurance of learning at George Washington University’s School of Business. “Sometimes people get so caught up in the mousetrap that they forget about the mouse.”
I see two basic problems with all this. First, in my field (and I think in many other fields too, especially those where evaluation is based on some kind of “performance,” be that an essay, a dance, a speech, a painting, etc.), evaluation is a key component of the teaching– you can’t simply compartmentalize them into two completely different jobs. It’s not like the mouse and the mousetrap– a rather unfortunate metaphor in terms of pedagogy, if you ask me– are two completely different things.
Granted, some large classes have graduate assistants reading essays or what-have-you (though I don’t teach those classes), but typically, those graduate assistants are a) a part of the class discussion and are aware of the dynamics of the course, and b) those graduate students are getting important experiences with teaching. In other words, they aren’t just there to do the professor’s bidding; they are to learn, too.
The second problem is about outsourcing in general. Simply put, if some quick-thinking dean or provost were to think this was a good idea, what is to stop the next logical step and outsource the entire class to workers like this in India or wherever? After all, we’ve grown relatively comfortable with the whole online teaching thing; why not outsource all of it?
Creepy creepy article, if you ask me, and I can’t believe a bunch of business professors actually thinks this is a good idea.
Just one slight update: Based on this CHE blog/brainstorm entry, not everyone there agrees with Whisenant’s point: “Ethics? Let’s Outsource Them!” essentially makes the argument I make here about why not outsourcing the whole process.
