Hiring a private grader?

[aginghipster]

Tenured faculty here at a tier-5 SLAC. My school has no TAs and no program for professor assistance. Teaching loads have crept up to 5-4. In the fall, I will have 200 students, and I already know that I simply cannot handle the grading. The workload is backbreaking. I've offered to take a paycut for a lighter load, but we have no class buyout program.

I know there are alternatives such as assign less, ungrade, and automate. Preemptively, lemme say I'm not looking for advice on those fronts.

What I'm wondering is whether anyone has ever privately hired a grading assistant. I can afford to pay quite well, thankfully. But I'm not sure about:

• where to find someone (remote is fine), and how does one advertise?
• learning curve: will it take longer to train them than to grade myself?
• transparency and ethics, I guess

[ergative]

Transparency and ethics are the first problem that jump out at me. If I were a student taking a class from university faculty, I'd expect my work to be assessed by university faculty, and if not by university faculty, by someone university-affiliated. I'm paying my fees to the university, so I'd expect the university to vet and hire the people who mark my work and determine whether I've satisfied the requirements for the degree. If you hire a private grader, you're breaking that link between me, my tuition, the university, and the degree.

Also, there are FERPA concerns: Is a personal assistant (which is what your grader would be if you hire them privately) even allowed to view student work and student grades? I doubt it.

[marshwiggle]

Transparency and ethics are the first problem that jump out at me. If I were a student taking a class from university faculty, I'd expect my work to be assessed by university faculty, and if not by university faculty, by someone university-affiliated. I'm paying my fees to the university, so I'd expect the university to vet and hire the people who mark my work and determine whether I've satisfied the requirements for the degree. If you hire a private grader, you're breaking that link between me, my tuition, the university, and the degree.

Also, there are FERPA concerns: Is a personal assistant (which is what your grader would be if you hire them privately) even allowed to view student work and student grades? I doubt it.

Bingo. That's a HUGE red flag. We're not even allowed to use things like google spreadsheets for TAs to enter grades, since the servers may exist outside out political jurisdiction. Even the potential for student information to be exposed externally is a no-no.

[downer]

I got stuck on "tier-5 SLAC". What is that? How close to open-enrollment is it?

In an ideal world, transparency and ethics are important. In the real world, the issue is what danger is there of getting caught. Definitely you would need to keep it secret. It might be difficult to find someone you could trust not to blackmail you.

What is your field and how much are you offering for the work?

[Morden]

At my institution it would be a firing offense, tenure or no tenure, because our collective agreement specifies that individuals who assess work in credit courses are members of the faculty union.

[Istiblennius]

Do not. You will be in violation of FERPA and probably of your contract.
Your students could sue you for violating their privacy and your institution could lose federal money, including student aid for an egregious violation of federal law. I know this sounds overblown, but it is not.

[Liquidambar]

A friend of mine has hired graders.  Permission to do this was part of her disability accommodation through her job.  It's definitely not something her institution allows everyone to do.  (This could be approved for either a physical disability or a mental health issue.)  She works at a place where a lot of former students tend to stay in the area, so her graders have mainly been former students.

[Puget]

As others have said, this would be a total no-go most places.
But, time is fungible -- think about instead hiring someone to do other things that take up time and you find unpleasant -- e.g., clean the house, grocery shop, etc.
And if you change your mind about not wanting tips on reducing grading burden, let us know.

[arcturus]

As others have said, I do not think this is an option, for the reasons they have stated.

You stated that you did not want to hear about fewer assignments, different grading practices, or automated grading. I can sympathize with this sentiment, since it feels like we are reducing the quality of the teaching/learning experience by making changes along these lines. However, there is a reason why these topics come up. It does not sound like your university is willing to provide the resources for an ideal educational experience (1 on 1 tutoring comes to mind...), so you need to prioritize the activities in your courses that are most beneficial for student learning and either compromise on the others or drive yourself batty with too high a workload.

The work load for 200 students is onerous. Even if you spend only a minute per student per assignment, you are looking at over 3 hours of grading for each assignment. The solution may depend on *why* you are having students complete the assignments. Is the act of completing the assignment enough, or do they need extensive feedback? For the weekly work (small stakes assignments) in my large enrollment classes, I assign a numerical score - so the students know if they are doing well/poorly - and provide generic feedback regarding the most common issues to the class as a whole. Students who desire personalized feedback can come to office hours or make an appointment. This means that the time-consuming part of grading is reserved for only the students who will appreciate it. I do provide personalized comments on the high-stakes assignments, but that is only a few assignments in total.

If you think that personalized feedback is important for all of the assignments, I would suggest setting up a system whereby you only grade a subset of those submitted (and use a rubric for those!). For example, let's say that you had 15 assignments due in total. For each assignment you grade 2/3 (or 1/2 or 1/4) of the class, based on a random draw. You allow students to drop their two lowest scores, so they don't get penalized if their name comes up on a week where they are overwhelmed with other work. At the end, each student should have 10 graded assignments, of which 2 are dropped, so their grade is based on about half of the total work submitted and you have only had to do 2/3 of the total work. Note that for this to work you do need to un-randomize the random nature to a certain extent - you do not want a student to have no feedback after the first 3 assignments, for example. Nonetheless, despite these small tweaks needed to implement this fairly, it is a better option, in my opinion, then many of the current methods recommended to reduce the time associated with high grading loads.

[the_geneticist]

Does your school hire student workers as part of their financial aid?  As long as they are a student who is CURRENTLY taking one of those classes, you could probably hire one of them as a grader.  Make everything as easy as possible for them (rubrics or scoring criteria), have clear expectations, and it should be fine.  I'm sure other folks in your department are also feeling overwhelmed by the avalanche of grading.  Ask around to see what folks in other departments are doing.  They might have similar solutions already set up.  It's easier if you're not the first to try it since you can say "I think we should hire graders in our [basketweaving] department just like the [pottery] department".

[Ruralguy]

My department has had graders for a long time, though I haven't done it in a long time since I think its not very transparent (many faculty do not have grader options and likely don't know we've had them for 15 years). Also, they often grade badly, and it takes a long time to train them properly.

[artalot]

I have heard of undergraduate interns or graders for intro courses - a friend of mine had one. These are usually seniors who grade exams for the intro course in their major. However, in my friend's case they were basically useless. They could only grade completely objective questions (friend is in the humanities where essays are the norm) and they were only around for a year. So, you're training a new person every year to grade a very small portion of the exam, and in fact, that portion that you can grade very efficiently.

As others have said, don't hire someone outside of the university to grade. Make the assignments easier to grade/fewer. Also, re: exams, there's growing research they they don't help much with retention. So, you have an actual pedagogical reason to dispense with them.

[secundem_artem]

I don't know if you have 1 class of 200 or 4 classes of 50 so this may or may not apply.

I have taught classes of 100+ using only written assignments - no multiple choice or other grading.  Students come to class prepared (and they do).  Some content is delivered in class, other content they pick up at home - readings videos etc.  I break the class up into groups of ~ 4.  They work together during class to write a position paper, debate a topic or whatever and turn that paper in as a group assignment at the end of class - like a group presentation, but in writing. 10% of the course grade is peer grading to deal with the "free rider" problem.

I could assign written work weekly and still keep up with grading by having ~25 papers of 2-4 pages to grade each week.  Still a bit of work but far easier than grading 100.

[mbelvadi]

Would it still violate FERPA if the prof anonymized the student work (eg assigns a course-only number per student and strip any mention of the author's identity in what is sent to the private grader)?

[marshwiggle]

Would it still violate FERPA if the prof anonymized the student work (eg assigns a course-only number per student and strip any mention of the author's identity in what is sent to the private grader)?

I think it might not, but you'd still have a problem with the grade being assigned by someone not employed by the institution.