My former colleague Oprah Winfrey reportedly resigned once the grading of term papers got too much for her.
Luckily, for busy Oprahs and slightly less busy Baligas and Elys everywhere, capitalism has come up with a solution – outsourcing of grading to India:
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.
Who does the grading and how do they know how to grade? Answer:
Assessors are trained in the use of rubrics, or systematic guidelines for evaluating student work, and before they are hired are given sample student assignments to see “how they perform on those,” says Ravindra Singh Bangari, EduMetry’s vice president of assessment services.
Mr. Bangari, who is based in Bangalore, India, oversees a group of assessors who work from their homes. He says his job is to see that the graders, many of them women with children who are eager to do part-time work, provide results that meet each client’s standards and help students improve.
“Training goes on all the time,” says Mr. Bangari, whose employees work mostly on assignments from business schools. “We are in constant communication with U.S. faculty.”
Such communication, part of a multi-step process, begins early on. Before the work comes rolling in, the assessors receive the rubrics that professors provide, along with syllabi and textbooks. In some instances, the graders will assess a few initial assignments and return them for the professor’s approval.
When will I be replaced by a robot?
Cheap Talk 
3 comments
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April 7, 2010 at 10:42 pm
k
Isn’t the question when will you be replaced by an Indian? Oh yeah…maybe when will you be replaced by an Indian who doesn’t blog about fine wines?….
April 8, 2010 at 9:08 am
sandeep
True! Also, I am feeling a little coy about the wine notes. I would point out that while the wines are fine, they are not crazy expensive by US standards!
April 10, 2010 at 7:06 am
dhlii
Doesn’t outsourcing grading – particularly if all work for a given class is not graded by the same source threaten to improve grading ? At least it poses a challenge to educational bias. My educational experiences left me with the strong impression that factors effecting the grading of work – particularly work that was more subjective, were participation in classes and conforming to the professors ideology, rather than quality of work. This was often made worse with TA’s who tend to be more ideological and less technically capable.
Outsourcing grading would reduce a professors ability to punish ideological deviation or reward conformance. Students would have to compete more on quality than ideology. While bias half a world away is still possible, it is less predictable and there are more incentives to reduce it. Even institutions with strong ideological identities would be more likely to seek ideologically neutral grading. Grading becomes another commodity the institution purchases rather than a weapon in control of the professor. Institutions have a stronger bias towards approximating objectivity.
Regardless, there could be interesting and possibly positive effects on education.
I am not presuming outsourced graders would be less biased as individuals, just that theere would be stronger disincentives to bias. There would be atleast two layers of institution that would be more likely to supress grader bias than professor bias