Warren Ellis on The DisinfoCast with Matt Staggs
The Problem With Moderates
Sean Hannity Vs. An Occupy Wall Street Organizer (Video)
DISCUSS (8)

Professors Outsource Grading Of Papers To India

Posted by JacobSloan on April 12, 2010

Outsourcing enters yet another realm of American life: college professors have begun using Virtual-TA, a service in which students’ essays are graded by workers in India. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

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.

Full story at the Chronicle of Higher Education

Related Posts with Thumbnails
  • Posted in: , ,  
  • http://disinfo.com Majestic

    Perfect – kids have been outsourcing their homework to India for a while. See:

    http://www.watoday.com.au/world/outsourcing-hom...

    Now the Indian tutors can both do the homework and grade it. The “benefits” of globalization become evermore apparent.

  • College

    The higher education system becomes more of a joke every day, nevermind the professors not teaching, now even the incompetent TAs are off the hook.

  • E.B. Wolf

    So the next logical step must be to outsource the professorial positions.
    If we can have student papers graded and critiqued by foreign workers, what do we need with overpriced, underachieving American professors and TAs?

  • emperorreagan

    It's not really that TAs are incompetent.

    It's more that the driving force at many universities is research. You are judged based on publications and grants, not on teaching prowess and success of undergraduate students. When I was a TA, when push came to shove, the pressing needs of the research always trumped whatever else was going on.

    It's what can be expected, though, when you operate a system of education where you're outsourcing the R&D for major corporations to the cheap labor of grad students. The focus shifts from education to research.

  • Darren

    Did anyone bother to check out the student evaluations of this professor at Rate My Professor.com?
    She has an overall rating of 2.8 out of 5, and her feedback on papers sucks, so no wonder she is outsourcing…
    http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp...

  • Gest

    I'm confused: my leftist professor told me that when companies outsourced jobs to developing nations it was a symptom of America's exploitative imperialism.

    You mean my professors were full of crap? What's next? Might the Tea Baggers be correct?

  • Anonymous

    A Virtual Assistant bring reliability, competence, creativity and other great characteristics to your business without the insane costs.

  • lawrenceperry1

    A Virtual Assistant bring reliability, competence, creativity and other great characteristics to your business without the insane costs.