Outsourced Homework Grading

I worked as a TA a few years ago and yes, the grading is laborious, but it also connects you to the student and their writing — good or bad. If someone other than the classroom Professor is grading, there is a fundamental disconnect. Also, what if the Professor is failing to teach in a manner that is consistent with the grading. At least you have the option to modify grading based upon how much area is covered in the text, or how well the students comprehend the information after the lecture and so forth. With this “outsourcing machine” there is no room for flexibility. The advantage is most certainly toward the teachers. I thought academe was all about helping students evolve educationally. So sad. The nurturing component is lost to the Ghost in the Machine.

Natasha David, Natasha at University of Memphis, at 6:00 am EDT on April 17, 2008

Who is grading the graders?

I would feel more confident about the grading service being sold to Kentucky if the company’s CEO had employed the standard English phrase “taking the burden off professors” rather than the more colloquial “off of.” I realize that speech is less formal than is writing, but as chief spokesman for a product evaluating written English among college students, his choosing to adopt a non-standard phrase hardly helps sell his product. Shall we hope that the reporter mis-heard him?

Diane Vanner Steinberg, Asst. Prof. at The College of New Jersey, at 7:24 am EDT on September 22, 2005

outsourced grading

If assessment drives instruction, perhaps the students would do better in an online course with fully outsourced professors. The quality of education is too important to have it outsourced.

Jane, at 10:32 am EDT on September 22, 2005

Responding to student writing is part of the learning process, both for the teacher and the student. Teachers learn the path of reasoning used by the student, the ways in which sentence structure support or don’t support meaning, and the specific patterns of surface erros, all of which can influence what the teacher and students do together as the class progresses. Students hear the voice of the teacher who may think through options for expressing main points, arranging evidence, and choosing words and sentences.

A major problem in the whole area of assessment is equating feedback with evaluation. Feedback is for improvement, and evaluation is for ranking. If grading is necesssary, it should come from the teacher who knows the full context for what is being graded and how the grade will or will not contribute to learning. Giving and receiving feedback is an essential part of the learning process, not one that should be extracted from the teacher’s part of that process.

Barbara Cambridge, at 11:29 am EDT on September 22, 2005

response to mws

I teach adult and high-risk students at a regionally-accredited proprietary college. Many of our students have been closed out of state universities, due to the artificially high admissions standards necessitated by subsidized in-state tuition rates. There is nothing morally wrong with this; it is simple economics. When the price of a good or service is artificially below its equilibrium price, the quantity demanded will exceed the quantity supplied. State universities cannot accept everyone who a) is bright enough to complete a program that is acceptable to a regional accrediting agency and b) can afford the in-state tuition. Thus, non-price barriers are needed.

However, that leaves a lot of people shut out of higher education. My students are predominantly single mothers and mid-life returnees. Effectively all of them work fulltime and see education as a career-advancemnt tool.

I went to state schools for both undergraduate and graduate studies. My ‘babysitting’ jibe was in reference to my own experience. My undergraduate curriculum was very liberal in both American senses of that term. (My graduate work, on the other hand, was very highly focused.) I had a blast as an undergrad, and sailed through my Creative Writing, Art Appreciation, Meteorology (cloud identification), Sociology, and other general education courses with flying colors. I was in my 20s and really enjoyed my taxpayer-paid four-year vacation. (This was in the 1980s, just before federal grants dried up.)

Twenty years later, things are a bit different.

My students chafe at general education requirements. They don’t see them as enriching or great ways to keep their GPAs up. They want core courses, and only core courses that will enable them to move ahead in their careers.

I reject the one-size-fits-all mentality represented in several of the posts here. Let Dartmouth College run its kite making courses (yes, they have offered such courses). If that’s what the children of the privileged consider to be a valuable use of their time and tuition, great. I’m all for it.

If only the representatives of the status quo would extend the same courtesy to those students who see education as a way of get out of their disadvantaged situations.

A. Chair, Business Department Chair, at 12:34 pm EDT on September 22, 2005

That should have been:

If only the representatives of the status quo would extend the same courtesy to those students who see education as a way of GETTING out of their disadvantaged situations.

A. Chair, Business Department Chair, at 1:10 pm EDT on September 22, 2005

I teach at a community college. I have a similiar student population that A. Chair refers to in his/her post.

I don’t know if community colleges have a far better ROI for students in terms life-time salary earnsing per dollars spent toward a degree than a for-profit college, private university, or state-funded universities. And the issue of funding of state universities is another matter entirely.

But I do know that community colleges are less expensive in terms of price per credit hour than other higher ed institutions. Community colleges are continually asked to do more with less. And we have been meeting that challenge, especially with the Bush Administration promoting community and technical colleges as paths to career enrichment and gateways into other institutions of higher ed.

However, I am aghast at the Kentucky system’s decision to outsource grading, as the population served by such institutions need the most teacher-student interaction, whether online or face-to-face, than any other. Not because they are less intelligent and need more hand-holding, but because they have been shut ouf of other entry ways into the system and need encouragement to succeed.

So let us be clear: this decision to outsource grading is not about the students. It is about increasing enrollment, which brings in more money. But it will not necessarily translate into an enhanced learning experience, because students will be graded on a rubric system they nor the instructors control.

Is this a matter of control? Yes. It is. Grading and evaluation of student preparedness, skill mastery, and content competency is a core function of the faculty member. Faculty are professionals who set the standards of content and evaluation in their courses. To take away a key part of that control is to begin to undercut the role of the faculty. Notice that this is being done only in distance learning courses. My guess is that the DL classes are not taught by full-time faculty members, but by adjuncts who might not even be located in the same region as the college whose courses they are teaching, and who do not have an investment in the department. Ultimately, we may find ourselves merely content providers, not instructors. Yes, this is a slippery slope argument, but it is worth thinking about, because it means we will be faced with difficult decisions. What does it mean to be a full-time, tenured faculty member when all you need to do is provide course content? Why can’t you be easily replaced by contract employees? It cuts to the very heart of what we do.

This is not to disrespect the hard, courageous work of legions of adjunct instructors. I put in my time teaching assembling a schedule of courses at various colleges and tutoring companies when I first began teaching and found it to be hard, time consuming work slogging between campuses for one third the pay and none of the benefits of the full-time faculty. But I did it because I love the work, because I liked being around students and seeing them gain confidence in their ability to articulate themselves in ways they did not know they could. If I was merely mechanically scoring their papers without any thought to the person who put the words on the page, then I would be doing the students and myself an incalcuable disservice.

Business decisions which are based purely on economic factors and not human factors are bad decisions, Period. People are not numbers or dollar figures to be shifted from one column to the next.

mws, Asst. Prof. of English at Johnson County Community College, at 2:34 pm EDT on September 22, 2005

Oursource the Administration

This outsourcing of essays is only a way to further disempower the instructors, 75% of whom are classified as non-tenure in our state of Washington. This is just a way to keep teachers in poverty. If the colleges and universitites really want to save money, then how about outsourcing administrators, who are making about 5 to 10 times more than 75% of the faculty.

Terry Knudsen, Instructor of English at Spokane Community College, at 5:32 pm EDT on September 22, 2005

concession to MWS and Poor PhD

We have three threads going here:

— separation of instruction and assessment — supply and demand dynamics — educational opportunities for high-risk students

After reading mws’s response to my response, I accept much of the subsequent analysis and am comfortable turning this around: outsource instruction and keep the grading in-house. This is what we do, when we employ TAs, more or less. (Actually, one of my colleagues pointed this out to me, after reading your comments. I think that it is a brilliant concession.)

Have the adjuncts and TAs teach, and let the professors do the quality control, and not only for students at their own universities.

As long as instruction and assessment are separated, the system is immune from corruption of the kind that shrill, right-wing libertarians like to write books and op ed pieces about.

With regard to Poor PhD’s post, I stipulate that supply and demand dynamics of differ from department to department. Where I work, Psychology and Literature instructors are a dime a dozen, Marketing adjuncts who meet the minimum educational requirements of our accrediting agency are hard to find, and a mentally stable Finance instructor is as rare as hens’ teeth.

A good Psychology instructor will get paid the going paltry rate; a good Marketing instructor will be able to negotiate the PhD rate with only an MA and probably be offered a fulltime position; and I would pay a premium for a Finance instructor who agreed to take his meds regularly.

At the end of the day, I stand by my original assertion that the one-size-fits-all oligopoly a) does a grave disservice to high-risk students (otherwise they wouldn’t be flocking to University of Phoenix, DeVry, et.al.), and b) is facing serious competition. This Kentucky thing is a step in the right direction of embracing the inevitable.

You don’t have to like it — and I gather that you don’t — but the separation of instruction and assessment is a very effective quality control tool. Just as online and distance education were once the purview of low-end schools, but has been embraced by the likes of Harvard, I’ll wager one US dollar that this Kentucky thing is just the beginning.

I think it’s great. You don’t.

I’m not trying to recruit you to my way of thinking, and I certainly didn’t expect a Spanish Inquisition. ;-)

A. Chair, Business Department Chair, at 9:17 pm EDT on September 22, 2005

A Modest Proposal

It would be so much more efficient to have composition classes of 100-300 students, a few TAs to keep the peace, and a Grand Lecturer on Composition. The students will demonstrate their writing ability by taking multiple-choice tests. This way we can get around the outsourced grading of essays, eliminate adjuncts altogether, and give everyone the truly cheap education envisioned by Smartthinking and their customers.

Kathy, Instructor, at 9:32 am EDT on September 28, 2005

I was a student in a program like this

Only, it was high school and f2f. In my senior year, the Ford Foundation paid for my English teacher to have an “outside reader” for everything we wrote that year. The outside reader did not give us a grade, but did comment (not as thoroughly as I do when teaching writing).

Now that I’m 30+ years older, I understand that my teacher spent considerable time trying to decide whether she agreed with the reader and how to interpret the reader’s comments for me. I have a clear picture of her with hand on forehead, staring down at a green inked comment silently for what seemed a very long time. And she knew the “outside reader,” who was a friend of hers!

Bottom line: Anecdotally, I’m thinking you might save some time by outsourcing, but not enough. The instructor has to catch up on the graders’ work, decide whether she agrees with the grade, and then interpret the results for the student. Probably, you’re saving *at best* 50% of an instructor’s grading time (I’m agreeing with Hesse).

BUT, that is because the logic of the KY program is flawed, as I’ll be glad to explain in a second post.

Disclaimer: my organization uses a whiteboard licensed from Smarthinking.

Ben Reynolds, Sr Prog Coord Distance Ed at CTY/Johns Hopkins Univ, at 12:04 pm EDT on September 28, 2005

Note to MWS:

We seem to have forgotten the helpful rule that the plurals of numbers, letters and symbols actually require an apostrophe. This prevents A’s from becoming As. I know this seems extremely petty, but it reflects our growing neglect/abandonment of helpful principles of usage. Such “rules” exist to facilitate communication, yet we tend to fail to pass them on, to forget them or to ignore them. All this bodes ill for the fundamental process of writing: one mind engaging another to produce authentic, clear, audience- and purpose-driven communication.

A. Teacher, at 1:41 pm EDT on September 28, 2005

For our friend A Chair

I cannot agree with one warrant for your argument. You claim that students can choose their education once this separation of instruction and evaluation is complete. What you neglect in this is the assumption that students must then be qualified to make such decisions. I would like to see a defense of that element of your argument.

I would also like to know just how many English classes you have taught (taking courses or observing them does not count) that you have any significant inside perspective on the pedagogical techniques employed by composition instructors.

You will note that I have already supported, if only out of my own curiosity at this point, the continuation of this experiment until such time as significant data can instruct the district whether or not to continue. I support that, but I cannot abide commentary by the inexperienced (in English) who comment on education as if universities were the only public system around. California alone has 103 community colleges. Factor those institutions into your equations, please.

Andrew Purvis, at 2:21 pm EDT on September 28, 2005

As I see it, the problem with outsourceing grading in composition courses is that my grades largely depend on what we have (or have not) been discussing in class. Thus my expectations for details, organization, thesis, grammar, etc. differ from assignment to assignment. The outsourcing process that is described here appears to evaluate all papers using the same basic rubric. Is that fair to the students?

Ed Vavra, at 1:50 pm EDT on September 29, 2005

Outsourced grading

I don’t necessarily have a problem with the Kentucky program, but I don’t see how it will free up all that much time for the faculty member — for the simple reason that you can’t help someone with their writing unless you actually read their writing.

The scoring of a paper is really not very time consuming, as far as the number you put on it. Any experienced writing teacher can usually tell how good or bad a paper will be just by scanning the first paragraph. Heck, often enough, just by looking at the first sentence.

What eats up the time is thinking about how to give the individual student feedback that they will take to heart, whether that feedback comes in a face-to-face meeting or in written comments and annotations. There’s a difference between reading a paper and seeing that it’s pretty disorganized and then figuring out the best way to get the writer to “see” the disorganization and then to work out a way to make the paper better.

Smartthinking can provide a useful service in giving the student another source of feedback (and tutoring) and in giving the instructor an objective, outside perspective on what their students are doing. But to tell the truth if I were using their services it would mean MORE time for me with each student, because I would want to go over each of their Smartthinking reports on their papers with them to show them how they could use this feedback to improve their performance.

Writing instruction is inherently inefficient and time consuming, because you simply cannot separate assessment and instruction. The assessment IS the instruction.

AJH, at 3:12 pm EDT on September 30, 2005

Respone to A. Teacher

You might have forgotten the apostrophe rule, but I haven’t. You also seem to have forgotten that using the royal “we” to speak about an issue you have with the person you are directing a criticism toward is condescending, rude, and smacks of classism.

My most recent edition of Hodge’s Harbrace Handbook, on page 239, indicates that an apostrophe is NOT required to indicate plurals of letters, numbers. The MLA style guide says that they should be used: so, who you gonna trust? No where in this forum or on the comment posting page does it say that we are to adhere to the rules of MLA style; thus the usage decision I made.

When the conventions conflict, you go with your gut. Picking on someone’s grammar and mechanics is extremely petty—especially given the rhetorical situation: an online commentary system wherein emotion and “need for speed” typing often overrule clarity of grammar and playing “by the rules.” And here we have a situation where the “rules” conflict. What would the outsourced grader do in a situation like this? Mark it down because they think it is not acceptable use, when one of the most widely used grammar handbooks says it is? What does that mean for the student who gets the paper back with an error marked, but a handbook that says there’s no error at all?

It doesn’t matter if I say A’s or As, as you knew exactly what I meant from the context of the situation. Does this mean that grammatical conventions do not apply to anything we write? No, of course not. But it means we must read the entire rhetorical situation in order to understand the piece of writing. And I’m not sure that outsourced evaluators can do that, because they are not situated in the rhetorical situations which exist in the classroom and may not be skilled enough readers to accurately gauge the rhetorical situation the student is trying to address off the page or create on the page.

And that is what “we” should be teaching students to do instead of worrying over petty usage issues when “we” ourselves haven’t checked the grammar handbook before putting “our” foots in “our” mouths.

MWS, Asst, Prof., of English at Johnson County Community College, at 8:40 am EDT on October 6, 2005

Increasing Class Sizes

In this ongoing debate over the value of outsourcing writing assessment, most of these readers seem to have missed a point only the “modest proposal” noticed: that institutions may be outsourcing their grading because they want to cram more students into each section of composition. Doubling class sizes that are already at 25-30? Even if every student received an individualized printout of his/her essay’s flaws, the students would all get lost in the mass of a large lecture hall. My freshmen comp students often tell me that our class of 20 is the only course where their instructor knows their names and makes sure that they are coming to class. Writing is so much more than following a flow chart or filling in blanks. A student writer can only develop when she is able to understand how her writing is a conversation with readers, both known and unknown.

I stopped writing extensive comments on essays because I found many students weren’t reading or responding to them. Instead, I encourage students to come to my office for 15-minute conferences, where I read their essays with them, comment orally, and require them to talk about ways to improve their writing and write their improvements directly onto the draft. This method is nothing original— Donald Murray wrote about conferencing 30 years ago. When a student makes a deliberate decision not to come for a conference, I will give him/her a grade based on reading the essay holistically (and quickly), keeping all my usual criteria in mind but not bothering to write anything on the paper. Quite often, these students then show up a few days later to talk about their writing and find out why I gave them that particular score.

The massively increased class sizes outsourced grading might cause would make my conferences ineffective. If I taught 200 students instead of 80 a semester, I would never be able to learn their names, let alone talk individually with most of them several times over the semester. They would know what score their essays received, but would most likely have no idea why or how to improve on their next essay or draft.

Betsy Gilliland, Lecturer at San Jose State University, at 6:16 pm EDT on October 12, 2005

Many of these comments see this outsourced grading as the opposite of teachers interacting with students. Simply because these papers are graded by another person does not mean that the teacher will no longer interface with the student. I’m a high school English teacher with 140 kids, meaning 140 papers to grade. If I taught English all day (I have one music class), I’d have about 170 kids/papers. With that load, I assign about one formal paper every 6 weeks. If I was able to have someone else grade the papers, I could continue with my 1 formal paper, but also assign many other smaller papers.

If I look at someone else’s evaluation of a paper, I can agree or disagree. Since I’m not reading the paper in order to make comments on it, it’s much quicker to read and I can focus on a holistic score rather than discreet scores in several categories of a rubric.

The assumption has been that all teachers who use this kind of grading will *only* use this kind of grading and will use it as a replacement for their own assessment. If professors are going to do that, they shouldn’t even be in the classroom in the first place.

This kind of assessment can be used *in addition* to the grading that is already done. It can also be used to expect more out of the students while still keeping the workload for teachers manageable.

Todd, High School English Teacher, at 4:39 am EST on January 19, 2006

“professional” graders

Hi Kevin,

Who do you suppose those “professional” graders are? Many of my TA friends in grad school scored essays to supplement their meager stipends.

KM, Assistant Professor of English, at 4:45 am EDT on May 15, 2007