Outsourcing grading

From the Chronicle:



Professors Cede Grading Power to Outsiders—Even Computers

By Jeffrey R. Young



The best way to eliminate grade inflation is to take professors out of the grading process: Replace them with professional evaluators who never meet the students, and who don't worry that students will punish harsh grades with poor reviews. That's the argument made by leaders of Western Governors University, which has hired 300 adjunct professors who do nothing but grade student work.

"They think like assessors, not professors," says Diane Johnson, who is in charge of the university's cadre of graders. "The evaluators have no contact with the students at all. They don't know them. They don't know what color they are, what they look like, or where they live. Because of that, there is no temptation to skew results in any way other than to judge the students' work."

Western Governors is not the only institution reassessing grading. A few others, including the University of Central Florida, now outsource the scoring of some essay tests to computers. Their software can grade essays thanks to improvements in artificial-intelligence techniques. Software has no emotional biases, either, and one Florida instructor says machines have proved more fair and balanced in grading than humans have...

Better still, grading could be outsourced to countries like India or Turkey that have large numbers of excellent academics willing to work for lower salaries than US instructors. Some of my colleagues have elaborate grading rubrics that they use to efficiently plow through 30 term papers a semester. But if the rubric is that good, surely it could be used by a contract worker instead of the instructor! For that matter, why do I write my own exams? I could download the final exam from some past intermediate macro class at an Ivy League university and send it to India to be graded - think of the time savings!