This post was written by Hatchet Staff Writer Priya Anand.

On a quest to provide students with more feedback on writing assignments, one university professor from Texas has decided to send papers overseas.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on April 4 that Lori Whisenant, a business professor at the University of Houston, found her teaching assistants inexperienced and unable to offer students enough criticism to help them polish their writing skills. To remedy this, Whisenant decided to outsource the papers to a service called Virtual-TA.

Virtual-TA, run by EduMetry Inc. and based in a Virginia suburb, has centers in India, Singapore, Malaysia, and parts of the United States. The graders, holding advanced degrees, communicate with professors through e-mail and review papers online, according to the report. Virtual TAs are given rubrics, syllabi and textbooks by professors.

There are some skeptics who doubt the efficiency of outsourced grading, though.

“An outside grader has no insight into how classroom discussion may have played into what a student wrote in their paper,” said Marilyn Valentino, chair of the board of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

 Chandru Rajam, one of the founders of EduMetry and director of Assurance of Learning for GW’s School of Business, told the Chronicle he hopes other schools will note how valuable the virtual TA system is to students, however.

“We tend to drop the ball when it comes to giving rich feedback, and in the end this hurts the student,” said Rajam. “People need to get past thinking that grading must be done by the people who are teaching.”