Core Post

On June 12, 2017 I boarded a flight for Tampa, FL. I was not headed to Florida to explore the Salvadore Dali Museum in St. Petersburg. Nor was I looking to explore the historic cigar bars that litter the old town area. Instead I was there as an ETS “scoring professional.” Over the next week I would grade over 2,300 AP exam questions. We were given student essay answers to the prompt “In contemporary America is artifice, in fact, key” (or something along those lines). The topic, we were told, was highly debated the year previous. Concerns were expressed that, given the nature of the 2016 presidential election--and specifically the nature of Donald Trump's campaign--this prompt may have suggested too much about the political leanings of ETS as an organization. "We can be a little political here, too" we were told.


We were also told, explicitly, that we were only there “making a bunch of money” because the work we were doing could not yet be outsourced to computer systems. “A bunch of money” in this instance meant something along the lines of 1,600 dollars for seven days of work—a substantial sum for a part-time instructor at a university with no collective bargaining opportunities or other forms of power where the average monthly income, for three classes was just over 2,500 dollars and where summer work was rotationally assigned. Regardless, approximately 70 cents per exam graded felt like a paltry sum when exam costs for test takers are taken into consideration ($94 dollars as of 2019).


ETS expected workers to work, seated in the chilly, open, conference space of the Tampa Bay Convention Center from the beginning of the morning until later in the afternoon with three breaks allotted: two for stretching, one for lunch. Stretch breaks were signaled by the lead scorer ringing a bicycle bell two or three times in succession.


On June 9, 2017 my grandfather suddenly passed away under sad and shocking circumstances. His funeral, due to family financial restrictions and the state of the body, was held on Thursday June 15 at 8:15 am. This happened to align with the ring of a bicycle bell in a chilly Tampa convention floor and the opportunity to stretch.


We repeatedly informed that any interruption to our work during the week would most certainly result in forfeiture of pay—so I listened to part of the funeral service from a bathroom stall before returning to work.


Upon returning home I signed up for extra, online work through the ETS online rater portal: https://www.ets.org/raters. I was hoping to supplement my income by grading exams during breaks between classes, on the weekend, and when free in the evenings. For technical reasons that I still don’t totally understand (something to do with the incompatibility of my computer screen and the scoring interface) I was unable to score tests, so I attempted to unregister for the service.

In the summer of 2018, while preparing to move to California to begin my studies at USC, I found myself without a summer class and without an alternative, viable, source of income. Doing what many precarious university employees do during the long summer months I applied for unemployment benefits. These prospective payments were cancelled due to my existing registration with an employer, ETS. Two weeks, many phone calls, a short-term loan, and a few office visits later my funds were cleared. My case, I was told, was caused by an error in the intaking services at the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. My gig work, it seems, was mistaken for gainful, substantive employment.