On Outsourcing Grading

This seems like a terrible idea:

[Lori Whisenant's] 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 said, “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.

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 T.A.’s can.

There are several obvious immediate objections that seem to come up here. First of all, this seems exploitative. Graduate assistants are usually very poorly paid, yet even so, I wouldn't be remotely surprised to learn that those in India were paid even less for this work. Secondly, I can't see how outsourcing anything else to India is going to help anybody; true, the assistant positions haven't been eliminated (though given the way university administrations are slashing funding to feed their bulked up administrative arms, I wouldn't be surprised if that were an outcome), but I fail to see why this is even remotely useful. Yes, the students have less work to do, but why not offer more funding to the department to fund more students who could assist the professor in this? Oh, right - the administrators are swallowing that money. And to be clear, I'm not suggesting exploiting student labor (hell, I'm a student laborer myself right now), but additional positions could simultaneously fund more students through graduate school, and leave all the students with a reasonable workload.

And it's the value of that workload that I think is what really bothers me here. Look, very few people love grading, but it's a valuable exercise for all parties involved. In terms of the students who take exams and/or write papers, grading is perhaps one of the most fertile ways to aid students' learning - if you grade with good insights regarding how to improve their work, you're not just improving their grades for the semester; you're improving the ways they think critically, thus preparing them for the world well beyond your own class (or even university). Critical thinking is one of the most important, most misunderstood, and most valuable things that students take from universities; high schools, with their standardized tests and limits imposed by policies like No Child Left Behind, certainly aren't able to offer a majority of students that kind of learning experience. At least in my opinion, it is an essential part of what students take away from universities.

And, as teaching assistants, it is an invaluable experience for the graduate students, as it helps them learn and refine how to help their own students in learning. Whisenant comments that her assistants "were not experts in providing feedback." Not to put too fine a point on it, but how in the hell does she expect them to learn how to provide feedback if their grading assignments are being shipped overseas? Learning how to assign feedback is as much a trial-and-error process for the grader as exams and writing papers are for students; over time, you learn which methods are useful for different types of students, which methods you prefer, which you are good at, etc. If the professor is expecting perfect feedback from graduate assistants, that professor has completely lost touch with the practical way that graduate school (which is, after all, an extended learning process in many ways) functions. You aren't solving the problem of addressing how to offer feedback by denying the students any chance; you're worsening the problem.

Certainly, I sympathize with the students' workload; I agree that having an average of 143 exams to grade per assistant is certainly overwhelming and unfair. But there are many solutions to this issue, and outsourcing the work to Asia seems about one of the worst solutions possible, for the students, for the assistants, and for the university itself as an institution.

Adventures in Bad University Administration

Leave it to the Aggies. An administrator in the Texas A&M system has proposed a novel "merit-based" bonus system for teaching faculty: awarding financial bonuses to instructors with good (i.e., better than other instructors) student evaluations.

I recognize the value of student evaluations, but I'm not naive enough to believe that they provide an accurate metric for excellence in teaching, especially across disciplines and courses. At my institution, I teach required, core sequence classes that all music majors take. My evaluations last semester were really good, but I can't imagine they are as good as they would be if I were teaching, say, the history of hip-hop or a course on the film scores of John Williams. That is, I think students and their evaluations are colored by the nature of the course (thinking back my student days, it is probable that I gave lower evaluation marks to good teachers of uninteresting classes than good teachers of interesting classes).

Similarly, I am fighting (or trying to fight, at least) grade inflation; I have a steep grading scale and am considered to be a "hard grader"-- most in my classes received B's and C's last term. Grading leniently (even the perception of grading leniently) has an effect on student evaluations, a fact admitted even by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. Does this, in effect, bait instructors to inflate grades in hopes of a $2,500 bonus?

So what is really going on here? Take it from Texas A&M's associate provost Karan Watson, as quoted the Byran-College Station paper, The Eagle:

"Karan Watson, Texas A&M's dean of faculties and associate provost, admitted that the bonus program has shortcomings, including a disadvantage to professors such as Loudder. It's also more likely that the instructor of a fun elective is going to get higher ratings than someone who teaches a mandatory class, Watson said.
But the fundamental purpose of this program, she said, is to measure student satisfaction, not teaching effectiveness."

(emphasis mine)

Christ. If I want to win that award, I'm going to start having no exams, teach only pop culture topical subjects, and have a dime bag as a required course material. I don't say this because I have a low opinion of students, either. I think students have vastly different expectations for different courses. A class on the cultural psychology of the Velvet Underground carries a different expectation than Organic Chemistry III, and I would argue that it would be much easier to get better evaluations with the former. In the fall, I'm teaching a class on modes of listening, which will be for the general student population and include mostly popular music. I guarantee I will get better evaluations for that course than for my post-tonal theory class-- it is human nature. It will be less work, closer to their experience, and likely an easy 'A'.

The point here is that a nebulous, "consumer-y" phrase like "student satisfaction" (as opposed to "teaching effectiveness") is a pretty shitty metric. I'd be okay with it if they polled my students five or ten years from now; if they are satisfied with the skills and knowledge they learned in my courses at that point, I think it becomes meaningful.

From the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation's David Guenthner:

"Universities were created for the education of students, not as a jobs program for adults," said David Guenthner, a spokesman for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. "Reforms such as performance bonuses based on student evaluations will improve the quality of education students receive by making universities more responsive to students, parents and employers."

I have a real problem with Mr. Guenthner's thoughts on this. This displays a fundamental lack of understanding about how the university works in society. We are not here to provide a comfortable experience for students. We are not here to be popular, and we are certainly not better off mimicking the consumerist drivel that companies spew forth 24 hours a day. We are here to challenge, to guide, to impart skills and knowledge, and to create a foundation for life-long learning. When you degrade these goals down to Scantron bubbles on a 1 to 10 system, or a comment card you might find at your local Wendy's, you miss the fucking point completely. Let us do our jobs. Let scholars and people who work in academia, who know the system and its challenges, deal with its problems. If evaluations are bad, there are problems, to be sure. The administration will deal with them. Students are not afraid of calling out bad or lazy teaching, nor should they be. I'm thrilled to have students that hold me to high standards of teaching. But that doesn't mean their opinions at the end of a long semester are a good metric to decide whether I am a better or worse instructor than others on my campus. This is a university, not American Idol.

Rightwing Nutjob Laugh Factory of the Day

Professor of Political Science at Grove City College (with the latter word bearing all the seriousness and earnestness of the "college" part of "Bible college")? Yeah, I don't think that will lead to laughable complaints about academia's role in the election of Obama, baseless-but-humorous biases against academia and intellectual communities, and fake concern-trolling for "diversity of ideas" or anything (but, to be fair, Grove City is not really a site of intellectual thought or diversity, so at least Kengor isn't a total hypocrite).