Thursday, April 8, 2010

Outsourcing English papers

Confessions of a Community College Dean has a good detailed post up the practice of off-shoring grading:
I don't buy the 'quality' argument against it, either. If radiologists in India can read images, and programmers in India can work on developing and fixing incredibly sophisticated software, then surely some smart folks in India can handle some freshman comp papers. Seriously. Other information-based industries have endured outsourcing without the quality of the work suffering. Given the inarguable indifference with which our large universities have handled undergraduate teaching for so long, to suddenly get huffy and puffy about standards is disingenuous at best.

The simple truth of the matter is that universities have engaged in a bait-and-switch with intro undergraduate classes for a long time, and have built an entire economic model on it. This may be a case in which following the model to its logical conclusion actually prompts looking more closely at the entire enterprise, which strikes me as a good idea. In the meantime, we'll keep running small classes with real faculty who actually do bond with their students, and doing it at a fraction of the cost. If folks would sneer at us a bit less, I'd be much obliged.
I got my undergraduate degrees (one in creative writing, one in math, but that's a story for another time) from a small four-year school. With a handful of exceptions, my professors were experienced, tenured teaching professionals who took undergraduate education and mentoring every bit as seriously as professors at big universities take their research.

A few years later I did stint at the state's big university, teaching undergrad courses and helping supervise the teaching assistants. I came away from that experience with the conviction that undergraduate education at most large universities is basically a scam, tricking students into buying a third-rate product with the lure of a big name and prestigious faculty members whom most of the students will never even see let alone study under.

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