Ethics? Let's Outsource Them! - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 4 views
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Many students are already buying their papers from term-paper factories located in India and other third world countries. Now we are sending those papers back there to be graded. I wonder how many people are both writing and grading student work, and whether, serendipitously, any of those people ever get the chance to grade their own writing.”
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The great learning loop of outcomes assessment is neatly “closed,” with education now a perfect, completed circle of meaningless words.
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With outsourced grading, it’s clearer than ever that the world of rubrics behaves like that wicked southern plant called kudzu, smothering everything it touches. Certainly teaching and learning are being covered over by rubrics, which are evolving into a sort of quasi-religious educational theory controlled by priests whose heads are so stuck in playing with statistics that they forget to try to look openly at what makes students turn into real, viable, educated adults and what makes great, or even good, teachers.
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the outsourcing loop becomes a diatribe against rubrics...
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It's hard to see how either outsourced assessment or harvested assessment can be accomplished convincingly without rubrics. How else can the standards of the teacher be enacted by the grader? From there we are driven to consider how, in the absence of a rubric, the standards of the teacher can be enacted by the student. Is it "ethical" to use the Potter Stewart standard: "I'll know it when I see it"?
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Yes, who is the "priest" in the preceding rendering--one who shares principles of quality (rubrics), or one who divines a grade a proclaims who is a "real, viable, educated adult"?