Outsourced Grading, With Supporters and Critics, Comes to College | Hacker News Reader

Outsourced Grading, With Supporters and Critics, Comes to College

chronicle.com

13 pointsjamesbritt6 comments

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.)

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?

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.

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.

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

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).

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