Bad Grades
"Last semester Lindsay Hutton "taught" 1,940 students. She met only 70 of them in person. Those were the ones enrolled in the two weekly sections of English composition that she taught in an actual classroom. The hundreds and hundreds of others she knew only as anonymous numbered documents she read on her computer screen and then, with a click of a button, sent back out into the ether.
As one of 60 graduate students hired to teach freshman composition at Texas Tech University, Ms. Hutton had a weekly quota of grading.
Each week she was assigned to read, comment on, and grade 17 drafts of essays, offer a second grade on 18 more, and review about 25 peer critiques and 20 student self-evaluations to fulfill her 12-hour grading responsibility allowing an average of 10 minutes per document. Ms. Hutton, a Ph.D. student in creative writing, is not paid per draft, but some graduate students who take on grading work during the holidays are. Last spring, for example, students were paid $2 for grading a preliminary draft, $4 for a final draft, and 50 cents for a peer or self-evaluation.
"Sometimes," Ms. Hutton says, "it feels like a factory."
Most colleges and universities require some kind of first-year writing course. Increasingly, the expensive task of getting masses of freshmen from widely varying educational backgrounds up to snuff falls to the cheapest labor: untenured professors, part-timers, and graduate students.
While institutions around the country are experimenting with technology to enhance or reinvigorate freshman comp, Texas Tech is using a computer system to entirely reinvent the experience. The university has cut class time in half, increased the amount of writing students do, and split the teachers into two groups: "classroom instructors" and "document instructors." The system allows faculty members to closely monitor the graders and collect piles of data about student writing and...
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