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Students used for cheap labour |
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Written by IRISANNE FAJARDO
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Monday, 27 November 2006 |
The University of Toronto's tri-campus union of teaching assistants filed an official grievance with the university last Tuesday, over disputes concerning an internet-based peer-grading system. CUPE Local 3902, a union of approximately 6000 teaching assistants across all three campuses at U of T, are claiming that students at the Scarborough campus are being used as "cheap labour."
Within the first-year Psychology course, Introduction to Psychology Part I (PSYA01), students are required to log into the program PeerScholar to evaluate and grade each other on two assignments in the class. However, according CUPE 3902, since marking and grading of student work is a paid position at U of T, the students are subsequently covered by the Collective Agreement for Teaching Assistants, which also makes them members of the union. As a result of this, CUPE 3902 is arguing that students are being made to work for free, which CUPE 3902 Chair Anil Varughese claims is to "compensate for the failure to hire enough trained and qualified teaching assistants to evaluate them." Started three years ago by Psychology Professor Steve Joordans, PeerScholar was established as a way to resolve the major problem of first year Psychology classes, which lacked a sufficient number of TA staff to mark assignments. Joordans notes on the PeerScholar website: "There is no way I could mark the written work of even 100 students, let alone [the 1500 students that are currently enrolled in the PSY A01]. Given this, many first year professors have simply given up on having any written assignments, and in my view, it is the students who suffer for this." Jesse Greener of the Canadian Federation of Students also commented, "The argument about 'quality' has long been used to justify increasing tuition fees. But these students didn't pay the rising fees for this course to be evaluated by each other rather than by a qualified TA, much less to be used as cheap marking labour." On the UTSC's PSYA01 website, Joordans goes on to say, "I will be completely honest. The original reason for seriously considering a peerto- peer evaluation process was financial. We cannot afford to pay a large team of TAs to mark written answers for large classes. Moreover, it would take them so long to do the marking that it also just wouldn't be practical. Peer-to-peer evaluation, when combined with great internet programming, is fast and cheap." The program PeerScholar is currently being used to mark two written assignments, which are worth 5 percent each. After writing their own answers in the program, students are asked to log in later during the week to read over other students' answers. Students are then asked to grade each answer based on criterion available on the website. All student work is graded by five students, to provide fairness in the marking, Joordans claims. CUPE 3902 is not only filing the grievance over the peer-evaluation system, but also on the fact that since student enrollment is so high in the class, only one-third of students are able to physically participate and attend lectures, while the other twothirds are forced to watch taped lectures from home. The University of Toronto is currently reviewing the grievance, and CUPE 3902 is still waiting for a reply. |
