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.