The Chronicle of Higher Education: 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. Via The Consumerist
3 comments:
While the prospect of outsourcing grading to people who do not have to teach and do research as well is tempting, I do feel there is more to gain from direct student-professor interaction on comments that cannot be gained when there is no way to ask for clarification on comments or to bounce ideas off the grader (directly, that is). The fact that the graders have no knowledge of class conversation makes a big difference too. I think this could possibly be successful with math or science classes (classes where there are right and wrong answers, and attributing partial credit is easier to assess) as opposed to expository writing-based courses like the business schools that currently use the service.
I think that this system of outsourced grading is rather unfortunate. I see enough problems with professors giving their grading to a TA who attends class, let alone someone who has never been in the class or met any of the students. As one of the comments on the article stated, when grading assignments, the professor can identify what the students are and are not understanding. While the ability for the professor to still read and analyze the work of their students still exists with this method, it's highly unlikely that they are doing so. After all, the whole point is to save them time. But then, whats the point in having a professor in the class? Without the relationship between the professor and the student, I think a lot gets lost in translation.
I think that it is extremely unlikely that these outsourced assessors can actually grasp what the teacher would grade on. The only way to be sure would be for the professor to look at all the papers, which defeats the purpose. While this seems like a good idea to take stress off TAs and Professors the students are (most likely) paying for the education that the teacher alone should be able to provide. And having someone besides who is teaching grade your work makes it almost impossible to actually gain insight into the knowledge the teacher expects you to be focussing on.
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