From the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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.
In Swarthmore College’s Honors Program, at least when I went there, grading also was outsourced. The professor sent the syllabus to an outside examiner, who made up the exam and graded it. This was considered a good thing.
Perhaps the graders who work for EduMetry are not as skilled as the outside examiners used by Swarthmore. Still, what is the next best alternative? Multiple-choice tests on Scantrons? Computerized grading?
As a practical matter, the alternative is not careful, skillful feedback provided by distinguished professors. However, I do expect that many professors at lesser-ranked colleges will see this as a threat to “quality,” meaning their incomes.
By the way, if you are looking for yet another article on MOOCs, the Richmond Fed has one. I am quoted a couple of times. This whole education-technology thing is reminding me of the early days of the Web in the mid 1990s, when there were lots of articles about stuff that seemed important at the time but which has long since been forgotten. Magazines like Business Week ran cover stories on “push technology,” “browser wars,” “applets,” etc.
I always tell friends that the university doesn’t pay me to teach, it pays me to grade papers. I love interacting with students, but grading papers is burdensome and often unpleasant. My department has very few TAs, and I never use them. If you take my course, I grade your essays. Also, current TAs know nothing of the world before grade inflation: they think that bad writing deserves a B and VERY bad writing a B-. I’d bet you could get the Indian graders to give better feedback and lower grades. Hey, the more I think about this, the more I like it.
BTW–I can already hear the howls of outrage from American professors who don’t give much feedback on their students’ writing but who will be shocked, shocked! that someone might think that grading can be done by more-or-less objective outsiders.
I wonder if any of these grading outsourcing firms will be vertically integrated with term paper mills? Imagine the increased efficiency — the papers could be written and then graded directly without ever having to make the inefficient round trip through the U.S.-based students and professors.