Grading essays may soon be outsourced

That Term Paper Might be Graded in Bangalore

By JACQUES STEINBERG

With all the other services being transferred overseas, should we be surprised that an enterprising company has sought to tantalize university professors with the prospect of having the grading of their students’ term papers outsourced?

An article on the Web site of the Chronicle of Higher Education opens with the story of Lori Whisenant, a business professor at the University of Houston. The article says that Ms. Whisenant’s seven teaching assistants can’t process the hundreds of thousands of words being churned out each semester by her students.

And so, the reporter, Audrey Williams June, goes on to write, Ms. Whisenant “outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.” The story continues:

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.

One obvious question: what did the professor think of the graders’ comments on those papers? The reporter writes:

Sometimes professors want changes in the nature of the comments. Ms. Whisenant found those on her students’ papers initially ‘way too formal,’ she says. ‘We wanted our feedback to be conversational and more direct. So we sent them examples of how we wanted it done, and they did it.’

Professors give final grades to assignments, but the assessors score the papers based on the elements in the rubric and ‘help students understand where their strengths and weaknesses are,’ says Tara Sherman, vice president of client services at EduMetry. ‘Then the professors can give the students the help they need based on the feedback.’

The Choice regularly gets comments from professors, and so we ask the academics among our readers — as well as students and parents, for that matter — what do you think of this idea? You can let us know using the comment box below.