It's not just "actual work", writing high quality tests and projects and then grading them is multiple full-time jobs worth of work. It's equivalent to interviewing 100 job candidates every week, forever.
Projects they had to demo, and they had a published rubric. While it was possible sometimes to play to the rubric, it still meant there was very little work to figure out a grade.
Tests, on the other hand, I had to dig in, understand what they were trying to do, figure out if it worked, and award partial credit. I guess the prof could have done multiple choice to make grading easy, but that has all kinds of problems with actually testing anything.
The fact that the university doesn't provide adequate staffing is not an excuse for short-changing the students still further.
Actual work for the already incredibly underpaid, over-worked teaching staff. As the money dries up in university funding, teachers are stretched thinner and thinner. That forces them to rely more on automated testing instead of having the time to actually know more about their students' performance. That in turn makes it easier for students to cheat.
The economics (as usual) are perverting the system. The individual participants are merely suffering from the perserve incentives of the system.
So I think I actually understand the system pretty well.
Edit: teaching is part of the job, dude. It just is. If you asked the average taxpayer (you know, the ones who pay the base salary before grant money is taken into account) whether teaching is an important part of the job, what do you suppose they're going to say?
If you don't want to teach, you need to find a job that doesn't involve teaching. If you accept a job that requires teaching, you're morally obligated to provide the best teaching you can.
Or so I see it.
No one wants to hear this answer because it means actual work for the teaching staff (compared to, say, automated scoring of multiple-choice tests), but it is, in fact, the answer.