« Declining pass-through and the widening trade deficit | Main | Economic literacy revisited »
April 27, 2005
Offshoring grading
Ohhh, don't tempt me at this time of year. But seriously, take a look at this: (hat tip: Brad DeLong)
Thousands of exam papers from England will be sent to India later this year as part of the marking process.
Critics in England say the move is the latest example of cost-cutting by outsourcing, and will result in errors in exam marking and delays in results.
...
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) exam board says that under the new system, GCSE exam scripts from England will be scanned into a computer file.
The answers of candidates will then be divided up between questions requiring longer answers and those with just one word answers - usually found in French and maths papers.
The scanned one word answers will be e-mailed to Madras, where Indian workers type them up so that they can be marked by a computer in England.
So let's see... the student writes a one word answer, it gets scanned, e-mailed to India, transcribed and e-mailed back to be marked by a computer in England.
If that saves money, it tells you something about the wage differential between data entry clerks and graders that I would readily believe.
Alas, I don't think this really applies to most of the grading that college professors do. Sounds more like an extension of the multiple choice test. Though I am not familar with the AQA exam in Britain, it sounds a bit like our ACT, SAT, and other alphabet soup tests.
And wasn't there just a big to-do about the essay feature in the new SAT? Tell me who wants to grade that! I guess there were strict requirements on how the graders were to grade the essays. You probably could write a computer program to grade them, but then if that program ever got leaked to the public... just watch the scores go up!
Bottom line: I don't see any huge deal about this. The profession outsourced grading to optical scanning machines a long time ago. That's not much different from having Indians transcribe one word answers.
My students can rest assured that there will be precious few one word answers on their final exams. (Maybe a couple in the principles course--none in the intermediate course.)
Be sure to check out Tyler Cowen's response:
The obvious question is what we really need professors for anyway -- are we simply magnets of personality to keep students interested?
Well, as I have suggested, I don't think that is the obvious question asked by this particular situation. And even so, we professors still program the "grading computer."
As for whether we are magnets of personality... your mileage may vary.
Posted by William Polley at April 27, 2005 05:46 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.williampolley.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/210
Comments
Just a reamrk - the AQA is one of many different exam boards, each of which has some freedom to set their own types of papers. They just happen to choose to do it this way. It's not a standardised national test like the SAT.
Posted by: rjw at April 30, 2005 11:02 AM