Annals of outsourcing: grading writing assignments

If they choose to, UAE universities to hire lots of cheap, qualified graders to give students feedback on their writing assignments. Having students write more is a highly effective way to get students to improve their writing skills; but they need feedback (and the incentive of an accurate grade). The bottleneck is having enough skilled graders.

From Inside Higher Ed:

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia. Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task—and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's can.
...
Mr. Bangari, who is based in Bangalore, India, oversees a group of assessors who work from their homes. He says his job is to see that the graders, many of them women with children who are eager to do part-time work, provide results that meet each client's standards and help students improve.

There's evidence that use of the service results in a decline in the number of students dropping a course.

More Americans outsourcing their jobs

This follows a trend first noticed in Sharjah by this blog.


More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas

Thanks to Greg Mankiw for the pointer.

Outsourcing the reporting of local politics

As noted at Marginal Revolution, there's a news media outlet in California with a job ad stating, "We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA."

Yes, and I know someone based in the UAE who reports on the political scene in the Episcopal Church (USA) and the wider Anglican Communion.

Economic Rent

A friend here in the UAE hired a low income expat to walk her dog while she is at work. A kind-hearted person, she paid him much more than the going rate.

Recently a stranger appeared at her door and announced (with hand gestures and broken English) that her dog walker had left the country and assigned the job to him. This job transfer occured without consulting her! The new man even had the key to her apartment.

I suspect that the original dog walker capitalized the wage premium by selling his job to the new dog walker. In effect the new dog walker is earning the market wage, not the premium wage my friend wanted to pay.