The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an interesting article ($) earlier this week about the use of online graders located in other countries both to ease the burden of scoring papers for professors and because teaching assistants were not offering quality feedback. The piece mainly focuses on graders from EduMetry, a Virginia-based company, which are providing this service for business students at the University of Houston, though one can easily imagine that there are schools across the country trying similar programs:
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.
The idea does not seem particularly crazy, though having outside graders handle final drafts seems like a good idea potentially taken one step too far. To understand this, consider the example of another school that uses outside assistance to help with its English composition courses–Tallahassee Community College in Florida.
Tallahassee CC has about 3,000 students go through its introductory writing course each year, and since it is not a four-year institution it cannot rely on teaching assistants. At the same time, it only has so many instructors, and if they teach multiple sections you could be easily looking at upwards of 100 papers to grade.
That’s a lot of work, but it also is important to do. Professors should read the final work put out by their students as a way to gauge their writing ability and properly combine that work with class participation and other factors to come to a meaningful grade that accurately reflects all the parts of a course.
At the same time, having professors putting all their effort into grading just a student’s final draft doesn’t best serve those in the class. Like with any skill or talent, the best way to improve is through repetition. For students with little exposure to writing, turning in a single draft and waiting two weeks for feedback is unhelpful and inefficient. Only getting feedback at the end of the process is likewise too little too late.
That’s what Tallahassee CC recognized while working with a nonprofit group called the National Center for Academic Transformation, which works with schools to transform courses so that they reduce costs and improve student learning through the use of technology. So what Tallahassee CC did was keep the instructors as final paper graders, but instead turned to a D.C.-based company known as SMARTHINKING to handle drafts. This shifted the instructor’s work to the most important part of grading–the final draft, while also ensuring that students could get multiple rounds of feedback. Students benefited–their essay scores improved relative to those without the additional outside help when graded on a common rubric. Instructors also had to spend less time grading.
Contrast that to the scenario described at the University of Houston. The instructors still give the final grade, but that ultimate draft is scored by someone else. And given that instructors then still review all the comments and can make changes before passing them on, the only way to have substantial time savings is to basically gloss over the suggestions.
There’s also a second issue here, which is that Houston does have teaching assistants, and it’s their inability to provide good feedback that led the school down this direction in the first place. Now, if those students are serving in that role just because its part of their grad school aid package and they have no interest in teaching, then that’s not a huge deal. But if those students have any interest in teaching, it seems like the school does have an obligation to help them become better teachers–part of which involves giving feedback on written assignments.
Just complaining about the lack of outsourcing seems like a waste of time. Technological innovation in education is becoming more commonplace in various ways all the time. Fighting it makes little sense. Instead, we would be better off with meaningful discussions about how to use that technology to help students improve their writing and not just ease the burden for professors.And if that can do anything to improve the jargon-filled disaster that passes for a lot of business writing, then all the better.
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{ 3 comments }
There are probably two ways to think about the draft/final version issue:
1) There’s a FERPA problem with anyone outside a secure environment having access to an assignment turned in for a grade. A number of university general counsels will probably tell administrators that it really should be for drafts only. (This problem exists with plagiarism-checking firms as well, and I now tell students that I recommend stripping any identifying information from papers uploaded to USF’s plagiarism checker, and that extends to checking a document’s metadata. No, this doesn’t change much student behavior, since they won’t usually check metadata, and yes, I know the warnings are just CYA… except that in practice it reduces their putting SSN’s on papers.)
2) I wonder whether a large outsourcing firm would respect the academic decisions of faculty even on providing draft feedback. It’s one thing to have a pilot project such as the NCAT work where there can be a close relationships between a community college and a vendor. But what happens when the same vendor is working with 75 colleges of all varieties?
3) There might be interesting and important distinctions to make between the bang-for-the-buck in comp courses and in other courses where you’d like to see writing. In reality, the best use might make it more feasible for faculty in large introductory humanities and social-science classes to require papers.
@Andromeda,
I see what your saying here, and that’s where I think that outsourcing some of the initial draft and feedback does make a good deal of sense. What seems a bit odd to me is having the person who decides the final grade not read over the final draft and comments. The other issue with Tallahassee though was that they had the instructor both running all the class and doing the grading, here you are talking about presumably some division of that work.
It also seems to me that you could tier the work a bit. The article suggests that students there write about 5,000 words total. Presumably that’s split amongst various assignments. Using teaching assistants to grade say the first and last paper and then turning to the tutoring service in the middle seems more reasonable, as it allows teaching assistants most familiar with the course to provide initial assistance and then also see how they are doing at the end, while someone else can step in and help in the middle.
The numbers that jumped out at me from the original article were that this professor had 1000+ students and 7 TAs. If 100 students per instructor is enough to justify outsourcing some of the grading, surely Houston’s numbers also justify it. If they’re outsourcing it in lieu of providing experience & training to the TAs, that’s a problem, but surely they can be complementary, with that staggering a grading load.
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