Still Grading Papers? Try Outsourcing!
We've all thought about it before. Usually the thought occurs when we're dog tired, underfed, our wrists splintering in carpal tunnel agony. And then we circle the four hundredth comma splice and cry, "WHY DIDN'T I GO INTO MATH INSTEAD?" Well, help has arrived. Now, for a small and highly reasonable fee, we can outsource our grading to qualified graders, all too happy to labor (I think they want food or something). Chances are, these graders have a better grasp of Standard English than we do anyway, and the comments will probably be more insightful than the red "AWK"s and "WTF??"s randomly distributed throughout a three page treble-spaced document (with 3" gutter). I can see it now--email all the papers out Friday afternoon, get "crunked," and have a set of marked-up papers ready for Monday morning. At what price, (in)sanity?
Wait a minute--what am I saying? This is awful, awful. These people are evil and should listen to Rev. Failwell.
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Comments
Questions: Efficiency and Students' Best Interests
I believe we might have some employees of Smarthinking who are Kairosnews readers, and I hope they'll weigh in here. (You won't be flamed, folks; we're all interested in discussing this new development with respect to what's in students' best interests.)
That being said, though, I'm concerned about how these institutions are going about the whole situation:
So they want classes of 50-120 students, and the professors will get paid the same rate as they would teaching a class of 25 students. With the extra money, they pay Smarthinking. It does seem kind of mass-production, assembly-line to me, especially when small class size and extra one-on-one attention is what draws many students to community colleges (e.g. the ones in Kentucky). How would these large classes be presented? Lecture? How can they have quality discussions with that many students? Would these professors still teach a 4-4 load of classes this large? Are they still expected to have one-on-one conferences with each student?
I wonder if this is really as efficient as the administration would like it to be.
CultureCat
Basic Writing
I have to add: The Inside Higher Ed piece should really be read along with this piece by Brenda Tuberville and John Lovas' response. Both, especially John's, provide vivid explanations of actual Basic Writing pedagogical practices at two-year colleges.
CultureCat
Although Clancy's comments
Although Clancy's comments point toward *outsourcing*, and particularly the outsourcing of basic writing, I'm fascinated by the conversation that occurs after the Inside Higher Education piece. I also wonder about how this "outsourcing" with SmartThinking compares to the composition program at Texas Tech, where the "grading function" and the "teaching function" of the TAs/composition instructors are split. hmmm....
How to grade papers?
I wouldn't mind using outsourcing to get additional comments on student papers. Having more input could only help. I do, however, object to the idea of having others grade papers for me, especially considering these grading standards:
If I understand this correctly, it means that having good transitions is graded as highly as having a thoughtful main idea. That's not the emphasis I place on different aspects of writing in any of my courses (whether developmental or honors), and it's not the emphasis I would want anyone to place on grading papers for my courses. With this approach, a paper could get a 28/32, or about a B+, with a thesis like "Water is wet."
Incidentally, my sister took Composition I at Johnson County Community College, one of the colleges mentioned in the conversation above. Then she transferred to a large state university before taking Composition II. She received much more attention, and learned much more, at the community college than at the university. I realize this is an n=1 argument, but it does illustrate the point Clancy makes about students preferring community colleges because of the small class sizes and personal attention.
math?
WHY DIDN'T I GO INTO MATH INSTEAD?
Hmn...I teach physics, and I spent a lot of time reading homework papers and lab reports. I don't think there's as much difference as you might think between English and other fields. All teachers have a lot of control over how much grading they want to do. Most teachers are conscientious, and try to find a system that allows them to maximize their students' education, while keeping the amount of grading time within reasonable bounds. My physics classes require a lot of writing and critical thinking. If I wasn't conscientious, of course, I could easily tailor the structure of my class to create the minimum possible amount of work for myself: I could not grade homework, I could structure my labs so that no critical thinking was required, and I could give scantron tests. I've taken a bunch of music classes at the community college where I teach, and the story seems to be the same there: someone teaching a writing course like harmony or composition can choose to structure things so that he has very little grading to do, or a lot of grading to do.
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Gradin' those Physics Papers
Thanks for chiming in, bcrowell. I know full well what you're talking about. Indeed, I regularly caution my students, "If you think you're not going to have to do any writing just because you're not an English major, think again." I regularly hear about professors in other departments that require more writing than any English course.
I'm assuming that by "grading homework," you're talking about requiring students to "show their work" and evaluating how they arrived at their solutions. Do you think this work could be outsourced to someone in Bangalore? To what extent is excellent skill with standard edited English necessary to do the type of grading you have in mind?
gradin' those physics papers
Hi,
I'm assuming that by "grading homework," you're talking about requiring students to "show their work" and evaluating how they arrived at their solutions.
Well, a lot of homework and test questions are nonmathematical. For instance, I might ask them to give an example of a situation where it appears that Newton's first law is violated, and then explain why it isn't really being violated.
Do you think this work could be outsourced to someone in Bangalore? To what extent is excellent skill with standard edited English necessary to do the type of grading you have in mind?
My school has a large immigrant population, so I have many students whose English is very poor. It would be interesting to see the Indian grader's take on a Vietnamese student's discussion of angular momentum, in a language neithr one is very comfortable in. There are several reasons why I don't see this as likely to happen in my own work: (1) the Indian grader would have to have *both* good English skills *and* a high level of understanding of physics; (2) community colleges are cheap to run anyway; (3) there would be technical hassles involved with all the equations, graphs, etc., that would have to fly back and forth over the internet.
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