January-February 2006

College Outsources Grading


The Kentucky community college system has started a pilot program to outsource grading, Inside Higher Ed reports. According to the online newsmagazine, the community college system has hired the company Smarthinking to evaluate student essays in some first-year writing courses, with the possibility of expanding the program in future years. The system needs to educate more students without spending much more money, a spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed, and would like to double or quadruple class sizes. Smarthinking, a Washington, D.C.-based company, employs approximately five hundred instructors, all part time, and provides online tutoring services for several hundred clients, according to its president, Burck Smith.