Grades can be considered a student property because it is basically the result of the student’s hard work. The notions and proposals that make the grading procedure be outsourced are getting more and more common these days but how could such action affect students and their perception about their grades?
Some American higher education factories and institutions are already taking advantage of outsourcing the tedious task of grading into third party entities (Fendrich, 2010). Of course, there are reasons why they are doing this and actually consider their reasons valid.
They are trying to implement such ordeal because they think it would be better for students, especially for the ones who are enrolled in writing classes, if their grades would be monitored on a regular basis. Another reason that they use to make the students and other opposing forces to agree about such decision is the being detailed of the feedback that could be retrieved from Bangalore (June, 2010). There is no doubt about the promptness and the accuracy of the grading system when there are dedicated firms and institutions that could perform the task of grading thousands of papers that are composed of 5000+ words every semester.
However, I do not really find such process ethical. Confidential matters like Grades and accounts should only be discussed and disclosed between the instructors, the registrar, the parents and the students. Also, it is one of the instructor’s jobs to monitor how the child is progressing into the subject or how effective his teaching process is. If all they will do is to forward the submitted papers to third parties, how could they monitor the progress of the student and apply the necessary reinforcements? Doing so would only complicate the slightly stable situation of the education system in the Unites States.
References
Fendrich. Laurie. Ethics? Let’s Outsource Them! The Chronicle of Higer Education, 2010.
Accessed November 2011. Available at http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/ethics-lets-outsource-them/22408.
June, Williams. Some Papers Are Uploaded to Bangalore to be Graded. The Chronicle
of Higher Education, 2010. Accessed November 2011. Available at http://chronicle.com/article/Outsourced-Grading-With/64954/.
