In the last couple of months, some very interesting memes have started to take shape around the role of the professoriate.

Grade inflation – or grade compression as some would have it – is of course quite real. Theories for it vary; there’s the “leave-us-alone-so-we-can-do-research theory,” and also the “professors-are-spineless-in-the-face-of-demanding-students theory.” Regardless of the cause, the agent is clear: professors. They simply haven’t held a consistent standard over time, and that’s a problem.

About two months ago, the Chronicle put together a very interesting article on Western Governors University and how they’ve managed to avoid grade inflation. Simply put: they don’t let teachers grade. Rather, they leave that job to cohorts of assessors, all of whom possess at least a Master’s degree in the subject they are grading, and who are quite separate from the instructors.

This kind of makes sense: teachers are subject matter experts, but they aren’t expert assessors, so why not bring in people who are? Unlike professors, who have to put up with course evaluations, independent assessors have no incentive to skew grades.

One could take this further. Not only are professors not experts at grading, but they aren’t necessarily experts at devising tests, either. Solution? Step forward Arnold Kling of George Mason University who recommends improving testing by having outside professionals taking a professor’s lecture notes and course readings and fashioning a test on the basis of them.

Are there good reasons to try these ideas? On grading, the gains might be on quality rather than cost. Informally, TAs do a lot of the grading in large classrooms anyways so it’s not as if we aren’t already quasi-outsourcing this stuff. But the TAs have no more expertise than professors in terms of assessment, so professionalizing the whole thing might be beneficial. On testing, you might not get cost advantage unless you had some economies of scale (i.e., you’d need multiple participating institutions to make it worthwhile), though again there may be quality advantages.

Of course, to get any cost savings at all on either of these, you’d need to get professors to explicitly trade their testing and marking responsibilities in these areas for greater class loads. Have them teach three courses a term instead of two, but do less in each of them. It’s hard to say if anyone would bite on that one; but given coming funding crunches, it might be worth somebody at least trial-ballooning these ideas during their next collective bargaining round.