Outsourcing Fiasco...
This week I read this article. This blog is going to be short and to the point.
This is an ethical disaster. There is absolutely no interaction with the students who have produced the work and thus how could anyone be equipped to grade the work that was produced. There is a major gap between the educator/pedagog and the marker. I am not against markers nor marker positions (I was one last term in fact). In my position I met with the students and with the educator and I understood the pegagogical underpinnings of the class I was grading as well as the positions that the students were expressing. I would never accept a grading position where this was not the case. I would feel ill equipped to grade anything that a class produced where I had no interaction with the classroom environment in some way.
In the situation given in the article neither of those things are happening. This is the worst example of random evaluation I have seen as an educator in my years of teaching. I already have problems with the evaluation process in general because it is important to avoid sexism, racism, ageism and any other discriminatory tendencies and often this does not happen. The fact that the professor who started using this service teaches business ethics, as mentioned in many of the comments, makes him both a disgrace to his university and to teaching of ethics in general.
Also this outsourcing denies opportunities to those who are close to the universities that need the extra help with large class sizes. Outsourcing papers miles away to be graded is a poor pedagogical choice which also denies the students positive viable feedback that is specifically appropriate to their work. Thus students are also denied the opportunity to both better their writing skills and to hone their critical thinking skills.
This is an ethical disaster. There is absolutely no interaction with the students who have produced the work and thus how could anyone be equipped to grade the work that was produced. There is a major gap between the educator/pedagog and the marker. I am not against markers nor marker positions (I was one last term in fact). In my position I met with the students and with the educator and I understood the pegagogical underpinnings of the class I was grading as well as the positions that the students were expressing. I would never accept a grading position where this was not the case. I would feel ill equipped to grade anything that a class produced where I had no interaction with the classroom environment in some way.
In the situation given in the article neither of those things are happening. This is the worst example of random evaluation I have seen as an educator in my years of teaching. I already have problems with the evaluation process in general because it is important to avoid sexism, racism, ageism and any other discriminatory tendencies and often this does not happen. The fact that the professor who started using this service teaches business ethics, as mentioned in many of the comments, makes him both a disgrace to his university and to teaching of ethics in general.
Also this outsourcing denies opportunities to those who are close to the universities that need the extra help with large class sizes. Outsourcing papers miles away to be graded is a poor pedagogical choice which also denies the students positive viable feedback that is specifically appropriate to their work. Thus students are also denied the opportunity to both better their writing skills and to hone their critical thinking skills.
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