Inside Higher Ed: Community colleges outsource grading
Many colleges these days outsource their bookstores or cafeterias or dormitories, based on the idea that private businesses may be able to provide better service at lower prices. Not everyone agrees with that idea, to be sure, but outsourcing of non-academic functions has become common.
But what about academic functions?
In a move that may take outsourcing past traditional levels, Kentucky’s community colleges this fall have started a pilot project in which an outside company is reading and providing evaluations of student essays in freshman composition courses. The program is small to date — only 48 students are having their papers assessed in this way — but Kentucky officials are enthusiastic about the potential for expanding the effort. And the company — Smarthinking — sees this as a service it would like to offer other colleges.
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