Neatorama » grading

Outsourced Grading of College Papers

Minnesotastan — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 03:18:05 +0000

Corporations have taken advantage of outsourcing for decades; the process lowers costs and often allows services to be provided which could not be otherwise accommodated. Now some university faculty believe the same principle can be applied to the task of grading papers written by undergraduates.

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 assessors use technology that allows them to embed comments in each document; professors can review the results (and edit them if they choose) before passing assignments back to students. In addition, professors receive a summary of comments from each assignment, designed to show common “trouble spots” among students’ answers, among other things.

Critics decry the lack of personal relationship between teacher and student, but defenders of the process counter that grading in the past has often been done by teaching assistants, and the use of “virtual TAs” in the Indian subcontinent is not fundamentally different. The process is not inexpensive; one example cited at the link indicates a cost of $12 per assignment per student.

The responses of students and the reactions of faculty at various universities, graduate schools, and community colleges is discussed in the excellent article at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Not discussed at the link is to what extent the papers being outsourced for grading were outsourced by the students to be written by someone else…

Link. Bobblehead image via the Neatoshop.

70+ Years of Collegiate Grade Inflation

Minnesotastan — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:06:16 +0000

Everyone is familiar with the fact that grades in American colleges and universities are prone to “inflation” over time, but the data are much more striking when presented as a graph.

We’ve looked at contemporary grades from over 160 colleges and universities in the United States with a combined enrollment of over 2,000,000 students and historical grades from over 80 schools… The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War. It was followed by a decade period of static to falling grades. The cause of the renewal of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s and has yet to end, is subject to debate, but it is difficult to ascribe this rise in grades to increases in student achievement.

In a companion piece, the authors discuss these trends in detail, compare the sciences to the humanities, and note that the same trend is not evident in community colleges. Of particular interest are links to the data from over 200 colleges and universities. At my college the GPA was 2.7 in the mid-1960s, and is now nearly 3.5.

Link.

Red Pen = Aggressive Color = Bad for Kids’ Mental Health!

Alex — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 19:25:28 +0000

School officials in Queensland, Australia, are worried about the mental health of kids, so they suggest that teachers don’t use red pen to mark homeworks and tests because red is an aggressive color!

Other tips include structuring time for peer tutoring every day, apologizing to students when necessary and asking students to conduct a "personal skills audit" where they focus on their individual strengths rather than their weaknesses.

The kit, designed to help Queensland teachers address mental health in the classroom, suggests social and emotional wellbeing has been linked to young people’s schooling, among other things.

The education aid has sparked a row in parliament, with deputy opposition leader Mark McArdle calling it "kooky, loony, loopy lefty policies."

Link