American colleges and universities are outsourcing marking to a company that uses markers in India, Singapore and Malaysia. The benefit for the colleges is that they believe they can get more consistency and timeliness than from graduate teaching assistants (the company turns around essays in 3-4 days). Oh, and the cost is US$12 per essay.

One course making use of the service had about 1,000 students pa and each student wrote 5,000 words/semester, which created an avalanche of words, so you can see why people would look for other options. I think it’s a useful solution, and mostly business schools have learnt the lesson in comparative advantage. That said, the link above will take you to a Chronicle of Higher Education story where there were 39 comments when I last looked, and most people hated the idea.

In an environment where people are looking to maximise services while keeping costs down, it makes a lot of sense to explore disaggregation and outsourcing like this example. One of the sad things about the lack of scale in NZ is that many specialist services never even get thought of, let alone get up and running.

You can find out more about the firm supplying the services, EduMetry, at their website.