Offshoring Creeps Closer to the Professoriate!

Sujeet Bhatt sujeet.bhatt@gmail.com writes:

BBC News: British exam papers India bound: "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 exam board behind the initiative, AQA, told the BBC that no marking would take place in India and that the move would make marking more efficient.

There has been no comment from the firm in Madras that handles the papers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4485517.stm

Comments

[Anderson]

Logical next step: "But, Prof, I didn't *plagiarize* by buying my term paper off the internet; I *outsourced* it."

[Chuck Nolan]

"No marking will take place"? WTF!! Why are they sending the papers there, then?

[Half Sigma]

In the future, students will watch a videotape of a professor teaching, then will take an exam graded in India, making the roll of the professor completely obsolete.

[Emma Anne]

Heh. I well remember the chill I felt when I learned that patent law firms were outsourcing some of their patent application writing to India.

[Jason]

What's with all the gloom 'n doom? This proves that offshore outsourcing is applicable to even the acedemic realm. Surely this will drive down prices, which is clearly a win for consumers. Right? Besides, what's the difference between having some guy in India mark exams or collect exam outcome info as opposed to some slav--I mean grad student--do it? We clearly need to explore this further. Let's set up a pilot programme where we have an Indian firm create and mark-up exams, create and mark-up homework sets, and provide contract lecturers to administer the courses. It should greatly lower the costs to provide courses. We can begin with, oh, say the econ dept.? Sound good? No? ;)

[Jon Livesey]

"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."

I thought this comment was hilarious. Errors in marking, lost and delayed results - not to mention a general dumbing-down of papers to the extent that far too many entrants get A grades - have all been widely noted scandals in England in the past five years.

I wish they would out-source the grading of papers to India. Judging by the Indian collegues I work alongside, educational standards in India are now much higher than in England.

[Colin Danby]

This has been an obvious possibility for a while, and indeed, as John Livesey notes, might be a very good thing if we're willing to step back and ask how we might take advantage of cheap bandwidth to combine teachers and students in different parts of the world. There's no reason for all education to be local. I have a colleague who does an amazing course that is linked to a simultaneous class in another part of the world, so that students in the two places interact.

So yes, it's not clear that if we had to rebuild education from the ground up, we'd replicate a model that was set up before the 'net existed (though somebody should write a history of lecturing, which used to be *less* central to higher ed than it is now).

The other obvious point is that outsourcing is likely to first attack the places where current local service-delivery is weakest, and I'd suggest that's the large lecture course graded by two or three multiple-choice exams. There are a lot of those out there because they help departments increase student numbers, and in those cases moving to a combination of texts, videos, and personal attention to regular written assignments via e-mail would be a clear pedagogical improvement. What you're not going to outsource is the ten-student seminar, but those are typically regarded by administrators as perks, as luxuries affordable only if we have the big classes to offset them.

[wkwillis]

Wow. We are even outsourcing the lawyers. I really had better outsource my landlord. If I am going to have to compete with Indian labor, my landlord is going to have to compete with Indian real estate.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Why did you post the poor chap's e-mail address?

[Kieran]

Shouldn't Economics departments be leading the way on this? I'd like to see Chicago outsource say 35% of its tenured faculty to India for a tenth of the price and not much in the way of measurable differences in output. That'd be putting their money where their mouths are.

[Ralph]

For the past five years, since retirement, I have been purchasing video lectures by prominent professors on a variety of subjects, put out by the Teaching Company. My interests have centered on Ancient and Modern European history. My expectations were exceeded by the quality of the lectures. They are really amazingly good. A recent example is a lecture on "the long 19th century: Europe from 1789 to 1917" by Prof Robert I Weiner of Lafayette College. There are 33 lectures about 45 minutes each. He covers topics like the French Revolution, the Napoleonic era, French history after Napoleon, Germany unification, Italian unification, diplomacy under Metternich, Bismarck, and post-Bismarck to WW I. Admittedly, this is one of the better products I have purchased and most were bought at sale prices. But as I have mentioned my expectations were exceeded.

[Keith Brown]

Well, Kieran, since a lot of leading Economics professors are in fact of Indian descent, and economists from anywhere in the world compete for journal space, I'd say we economists have been doing the international competition thing for quite awhile, and we're better for it, since we can debunk the anti-free trade arguments that still seem to take in other academics...like you.

[Kieran]

Keith -- Touchy, touchy. If you're happy to think that the employer/employee matching process and the journal publication system in Economics both function like a competitive free market, good luck to you.

[Don Quijote]

"Shouldn't Economics departments be leading the way on this? I'd like to see Chicago outsource say 35% of its tenured faculty to India for a tenth of the price and not much in the way of measurable differences in output. That'd be putting their money where their mouths are."

the hell with 35%, let's make it 100%. It'll give them a chance to appreciate the finer points of Globalization when their mortgages come due on the 1st of the month.

[Keith Brown]

Not touchy, Kieran, just amused. Since getting and keeping a job at Chicago does require getting into top journals and competing with economists around the world, and because grad students and top research economists are pretty mobile, then yes, the Chicago econ profs are competing in something pretty close to a global free market.

If Chicago could hire a bunch of Indian economists at 1/10th the price and get the same research output, then they should. The problem is, they can't. Those Indian economists that do top research charge quite a bit, themselves.

Certainly, economists compete with each other internationally far more than other academic disciplines. In fact, economists have competed with foreign competitors for much longer than many non-economists. That's a bit of a problem for the "economists don't want to live by their own rules" crowd.

[Ennis]

Ahem - Brad! Shame on you! The article says that they're not marking the paper's in India, just typing up handwritten one word responses so that they can be graded in the UK. It's a transcription service, just one of many in India.

Here are the relevant quotes:

"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.

`There is no marking that takes places in India, just keying in [the answers],' AQA spokeswoman Clare Ellis told the BBC News website."

Everybody - stop jumping to conclusions!

[Adam]

To Ennis's point, it does seem like it's just transcription. But what if it wasn't? Why would that be bad? Grading papers is certainly one of the less enjoyable parts of being a grad student, done primarily because of a percieved lack of alternative graders. Wouldn't grad students be better off if they didn't have to spend time doing this?

I would assume essay questions would still have to be graded by someone familiar with exactly what was and was not covered in all of the lectures, and hence difficult to outsource. They also require subjective judgement. But subjects with objective correct answers (foreign languages, math), why not outsource them?

[nate]

grades may become worth less

http://www.the-south-asian.com/Jan%202003/Corruption.htm