No, really. A company based in Virginia can arrange for student papers to be assessed by trained experts and sent back to you for assigning whatever grade you choose, based on their evaluations. The assessors are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with the United States, according to media reports. They do all their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail.
The idea is to have the assessors provide detailed feedback, using precise protocols that are set by the faculty member. The service is called Virtual T-A, from a company called EduMetry.
As one user puts it, "Because Virtual-TA provides detailed comments about grammar, organization, and other writing errors in the papers, students have a framework for improvement that some instructors may not be able to provide."
And the price? According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription), it varies by length and complexity, but Virtual-TA suggests to potential clients that each graded assignment will cost $12 per student. Which means that outsourcing six assignments for 20 students in a course would cost $1,440.
Leaving aside the irony of using grammatical assistance in English from, say, Bangalore, to evaluate a paper on, say, Mark Twain's significance to American literature, the cost begs a number of questions about the class size at a typical college or university.
The price listed above is approximately what some adjunct faculty members earn for an entire course. Looks like the concept has a ways to go.
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