
Outsourced Grading, With Supporters and Critics, Comes to College - jamesbritt
http://chronicle.com/article/Outsourced-Grading-With/64954/
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patio11
I've always thought that American high schools could outsource grading of
probably 95% of assignments to in-school paraprofessionals or work-at-home
moms, which would free teachers up for individualized instruction. (Hire cheap
gophers to scan papers into a centralized system, your distributed workforce
grades them in near-real time, results available in your inbox and online
gradebook before the end of the day.)

It is crazy that we have folks with e.g. master's degrees in history marking
90 copies of the same "connect the term with the definition" homework
assignment when it could be done by anybody capable of reading. (The cost of
having a 40 year old teacher with a master's degree mark that homework
assignment is, as a ballpark number, about $150. It could be done by a
Midwestern housewife with a master's degree for $20 if you let her work from
home, or for $10 if you outsourced it overseas.)

That avoids the larger problem of "Why did we assign that?", of course. (And
the unions will, predictably, never go for it.)

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glen
This is pretty remarkable. We have use MTurk to help develop educational
content and have thought about using virtual TAs to help w/research and
tutoring, but not for actual grading. To me, that feels a bit like a stretch.
However, on the other hand, if you've got qualified people that can do a
better job than you can do as a professor, then you may actually be doing your
students a service by using this platform.

Educational services are quickly becoming a global market. Quick example. Our
CTO was less of a believer in the power of MTurk. We (www.nixty.com) were
converting a physics course from MIT. The tests were in PDF form. (a.
problems; b. solutions). We wanted them to be in multiple choice form. No one
on the team had the capability to create relevant multiple choice responses.
We created a HIT on MTurk. A guy from Bangalore signed up for the HIT. He had
a Master's in Science and had taught Physics earlier in his career. He banged
out the multiple choice responses in a day. We had them cross-checked and they
were solid. Pretty cool, right?

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ahi
If I was a student I would be pissed. How can you personalize education
without actually reviewing students' assignments? Should students outsource
their assignments as well? This angers me more than it should, but I deal with
far too many profs on a daily basis who think they are simply too important to
deal with students. Just do your fucking job.

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hga
She's teaching 1,000 students this course every year, so at minimum I'd expect
500 in a single semester. I have no idea if she thinks she's "simply too
important to deal with students", but in a class of that size I'd expect no
more than two brief bits of semi-casual communication with her (e.g. in the
minutes after a lecture).

The real question is why she has a budget for only 7 TAs, "some of whom did
not have much experience", in a class which is in part serving as remedial
English. At best that's 125 students per TA ... and again I'd expect to be
able to get very little communication with whichever one was assigned to me at
that sort of ratio.

Something has to give, and if the subject matter really counts, maybe this is
one of the less bad choices.

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julius_geezer
If she doesn't want to read it, why should they want to write it?

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hga
Well, it's implied that she wants her team to read them but they can't do the
workload (125 pages per person per semester); perhaps this is more of a budget
problem.

Obviously for all the usual reasons she's getting a lot of students who aren't
good at reading, and it's not clear to me that they'd be better served by a
generic remedial English class instead of having to write more real world
stuff in her's.

Also a "you get what you pay for" problem; perhaps we shouldn't expect better
from a 2nd tier or lower state schools (e.g. below the University of Texas
system (for which I have some affection from a NSF Summer Science Training
Program at UT Austin I attended in high school) and I'd guess below the Texas
A&M system).

