So Who Assays the Essays?

July 19th, 2010 by admin

It is not a secret that for many of us the word “essay” has now become a synonym of tiresome and pointless activity, a school punishment imposed on an under-achieving student in a frail hope that he will achieve points by browsing through the subject course and supposedly writing (if not just copy-pasting articles from the Internet libraries or order it in online writing service) some pathetic excuse-for-a-research to get a “satisfactory” grade and thus finish another odious course.

It is not a secret either that checking and grading those highly artistic student masterpieces has become a real pain in the neck for professors and TAs who have to spend their valuable time on processing the hundreds of thousands of words, yielded at the end of each semester by their students, rather than concentrating on the first-hand teaching and conducting their research work.

It is sad to admit, but the overall modern trend consists in increase of class sizes and depersonalization of education. Teaching is no longer a one-to-one communication in many schools and universities, and the whole educational process often gets lost in a large human assembly of many faces and voices. Essays seem to be aimed at elimination of such repercussions, however they only complicate the matter as professors often have no time and resources to duly assess and grade the loads of their students’ papers.

That is why some universities already test the outsourcing practice. Thus, a business professor at the University of Houston outsourced essay grading to a company whose employees are mostly Asian residents. The case has already triggered a wave of heated debates, with main arguments centering on the degradation of American education and condemnation of such practice.

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