The prime issues surrounding art education’s evaluative systems.
Here’s my beef with grades: they’re distracting. In artistic fields of study, grades prove more harmful than beneficial. Why? Because grading art is heavily subjective.
To today’s students—who are competing against ever-increasing applicant pools—grade point averages have become the end-all-be-all. They are valued above quality of product. In art-driven fields, where the product is the centerpiece, this is extremely detrimental.
Art education is supposed to cultivate and spur the seeds of creativity, not water them down with subjective evaluations of your worth. Speaking as a graduate of Virginia Tech’s graphic design program, more often than not, students’ capabilities are limited when their minds are oriented towards getting an “A”, rather than testing new strategies. Because when you test new ideas and go where you’ve never gone before, there’s a higher chance of failure.
“Art education is supposed to cultivate and spur the seeds of creativity, not water them down with subjective evaluations of your worth.”
“Crap is Fertilizer”
I had this professor in college who, every year, without fail, would begin the semester by offering us a single piece of advice. “Crap is Fertilizer,” he’d say, with an air of Buddha-like wisdom hanging in the air.
This single piece of advice would have gotten very annoying if it didn’t hold a powerful reminder in it.
Why is failure considered such a bad thing? Students should be encouraged to fail. By failing, we learn from our mistakes. By failing, we shed bad ideas to reveal the good. By failing, we arrive at more successful solutions by trial and error.
There’s a malevolent expectation to consistently put forth the best work possible — but, students are amateurs. Students aren’t there to impress. Students are there to grow. And, growth doesn’t flourish in success — it feeds on failure.
In my last article, I mentioned how the goal of learning should be emphasized over the initial product. If we are expected to produce great design at the very commencement of our careers, where does that set us on our path to progression? Mistakes should be welcomed and encouraged amongst students, not condemned.
Reevaluating our Evaluative Systems
To fully understand the problem, we must first look at how art is typically evaluated. The process of critiquing art usually begins by assessing a piece’s technical refinement. In other words, it’s assessed according to objective artistic standards. Then, critics assert their opinions about whether they like or dislike the piece. They subjectively assess the “flavor” of the art piece.
This is where problems arise. Professors in artistic fields have wildly different creative palates and preferences. Case in point: my sophomore year, I had two professors assign identical resume design exercises, to which I submitted the same exact document. While I wasn’t intending for it, the resume served as a sort of control for the experimental results I now offer:
Both design professors viewed the same resume, but gave contradictory feedback for how to receive the best grade (because that’s what matters most, right?). One said the type size was too small. The other said it was too large. One said I needed to include more color, the other said it was too distracting.
Can you see how this loose systematic grading is frustrating to students? Especially when such subjective assessments are what future employers will see as a reflection of our academic performance?
Never “Play to the Gallery”
David Bowie, one of the most influential artist in recent generations, once gave some profound advice to “aspiring artists”:
“Never play to the gallery…. Never work for other people in what you do. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society…. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations.”
Too often, our grades are lowered by opinionated viewings of our work. And, too often, we deem those opinionated viewings superior to our own instinctual drive.
This is an extreme hinderance to our art education for a few reasons. First, the point of art is subjectivity, and democratically so. When you strip art to a certain letter grade of worth, it becomes standardized and loses the creative freedom it is so often celebrated for.
Secondly, a single professor’s taste prevails over our performance, reflecting how well we adhered to their preferences by the lone letter they denote to our projects. An “A” becomes a sort of seal of congratulatory approval: “Congrats! You nailed my design aesthetic on the head!” while a “B” or “C” becomes a sympathetic foreboding: “Better luck next time.”
Not only does this hinder the creativity of students, but it unknowingly forces us into cookie cutter approaches to design. We learn what our professors like and dislike, and refuse to stray from that norm for the sake of sparing any jabs at our GPA. This is the most dangerous thing you could possibly teach design students. In fact, this is the most dangerous thing you can teach just about any student.
A New Grading Method for Artists
Understandably though, where so much of the work is subjective, there is an importance to implement some type of system for students to gauge their improvement. I propose that there is a focus on formative assignments with periodic summative assessments. These summative assessments should be placed at the middle and end of the semester, like midterms and finals in other fields of study.
In the current art curriculum, students jump from one graded project to the next; why don’t we make these projects formative? Take the grades away––or assign grades based on completion. These formative assessments will still provide students with all the knowledge they need to be productive in the classroom: They will have (1) an understanding of where they are going or what a desirable outcome looks like, (2) the ability to determine where they are in reaching those goals, and (3) what they need to do individually to reach those goals.
Come midterms, there can be a portfolio review of the student’s work to ensure they are improving at the projected pace and staying on track with the desirable growth rate. This one-on-one portfolio feedback with professors will also allow students a security in their work, knowing that they are progressing on pace with their peers. This personal review can be repeated at the end of the semester to assess the student’s entire output of work for the year.
This revised structure, along with regular classroom critique of each peer’s work, will provide students with the same amount of learning, without the pressure of grades penalizing quality of work.
Our best creative moments happen in moments when we have no expectations—because freedom allows us to explore our deepest, wildest inspirations. Students are more driven, motivated, innovative, and excited about their creations when it is something they are genuinely interested in. Rather than something lying inside those cookie cutter, standardized approaches to art.
Assign grades to beef, not our worth.
