On Outsourced Grading

The Inside Higher Education story on outsourced grading has started a lot of comments thrown back and forth about the value of outsourced grading of student papers. I spent over 35 years in English and English studies classrooms—most of that time with a heavy load of composition courses. When I left the classroom to take a cushy office job, the thing I missed most was reading student papers. When I would mention this to colleagues, most of whom were still in the classroom, they would look askance until I would say, “I miss reading student papers, but I don’t miss the stacks of papers that I had to get back to students by tomorrow morning.” And then they would see what I meant. But even the stacks were fun. Yes, we all learn how to pace ourselves so that we can read a stack in the time our job demands, but the pleasure and privilege of working with another person as they struggle to voice something profound to them is the center of teaching composition. And it is what makes for good composition instruction.

The threads of discussion following the story show that most people not intimately involved with teaching composition do not understand, as we do, that assessment is not grading, that assessment is how we help our students improve—it is coaching.

Good teaching, as in good coaching, only works when there is a continual response, a continual communication, between student and teacher. A teacher separated from responding to student work is like a coach trying to improve performance without seeing the performance or giving feedback.

We need to clarify to other academics, to our administrators, and to the public that we do not grade papers. We respond to our students’ work. Yes, in the process, we make judgments that we share with our students, and we use writing assessment as a way of determining value in addition to improving work, but the heart and soul of composition instruction (and it should be of all instruction) is the person-to-person response of the teacher to the student. Students do not improve their writing skills through error counting, but they do through good assessment that is more often in the frame of a response than a grade.

The NCTE framing statement on assessment and the CCCC statement of assessment of writing make that abundantly clear. Print them and use them on your campus to help your campus community understand that improving student writing will not happen with outsourced grading. And that is the real bottom line. No education program is economically sound if it does not foster student improvement.