What would happen if Canadian universities outsourced the grading of science, technology and mathematics assignments?

While I don’t usually blog about formal education, it is an important part of the science ‘environment’ and, last week. I came across a new development in US post secondary education  which could have an impact on Canadian post secondary education.  What could be the possible impact of outsourcing some of the duties usually associated with teaching assistants such as grading papers? A question that rose when reading this article by Andrea Belz in Beta News,

…  College professors are now outsourcing grading, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in April.

Teaching assistants (TAs) have provided that service for generations, but now it is going overseas. Recession-hit universities get even better deals outsourcing than they did with notoriously underpaid graduate students. Now, this work often ends up in the hands of credentialed Indian stay-at-home moms eager to work part-time.

In the sciences, department operating funds paid graduate students while they completed years of coursework; usually, doctoral students then eventually transitioned to receiving stipends from a professor’s research grants. In the humanities, the TA phase could extend even longer as students toiled away on their theses.

As Belz goes on to note, there’s a danger that graduate students from all faculties will simply abandon their studies. Since Belz roused my curiosity, I found the original article by Audrey Williams June in The Chronicle of Higher Education and found that, to date, it’s mostly business faculties (although the practice is not confined to them) who seem to have explored this option. From the article,

Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.

Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn’t deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. “Our graders were great,” she says, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.”

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.

June goes on to interview both critics and supporters for this practice  and does reiterate the point that students are more likely to persevere and improve their performance when they’re given substantive feedback on their efforts. She does not, as Belz does,  speculate as to the possible impact on the education system as a whole.

I have a question, is anyone suggesting that 1000 students in a class is too many? That number suggests a theatre or music performance not a teaching situation.

As for Whisenant, the professor featured in the excerpt, I find her reasoning odd and here’s why. If she has seven teaching assistants (TA) and 1000 students and assuming that she grades some of the papers herself, that works out to 125 papers to mark for each assignment. Presumably, her TAs are graduate students who are also taking courses and writing papers and/or working on their theses. So, reading/marking 125 assignments plus doing your own student work is a huge workload. So here’s my next question. How can Whisenant make this comment? “Our graders were great,” she says, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.” With 125 papers to mark one or more times in a semester (each student was producing 5000 words), the issue can’t be expertise in providing feedback. I don’t care how expert you are, you’ll never be able to give adequate feedback with that kind of a workload.

In speculating on which disciplines might lend themselves most easily to this type of outsourcing, I would have thought that sciences, mathematics, and technology (i.e. engineering and the like) programmes would be the most likely candidates. I find it fascinating that the uptake, so far, is with courses that heavily require written assignments.

I can see the advantages for undergraduate students in classes that are huge and/or online but the impact on graduate students seems nothing short of devastating unless remedies are applied before a crisis occurs.

In any event, I’m sure Canadian universities are watching with great interest.

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