Earlier in the fall, I received a mass-mailed letter from the College Board’s AP Studio Art Development Committee. Ordinarily, I toss these sorts of things into the trash. This time I decided to sit down and read the whole letter.
It began by saying, “We invite you to participate in a rewarding, professional service opportunity: the weeklong AP Studio Art Exam Reading in June 2008.” The invitation to participate was almost immediately rescinded, however, since a few sentences later it was modified by, “We welcome applications from faculty at your institution.” Some people may think I’m nitpicking in pointing out the incorrect order of these sentences (as well as the factual inaccuracy of the first sentence), but I’m not. This is an example of egregiously bad writing. If people in positions of authority can’t write a good 9th-grade level paragraph, why should we trust them about anything else?
According to the letter, the way the AP Studio Art scoring takes place is as follows: “Over the course of a week in early June, the selected faculty will review the high school portfolios that are submitted for consideration for AP credit.” Last year, according to the letter, there were more than 29,000 AP Studio Art portfolios submitted that were scored during one of these week-long sessions and then sent to institutions “for consideration for advanced placement, credit, or both.”
Just as a camel is a horse designed by a committee, a poor high-school studio portfolio is a good portfolio chosen by an AP committee. OK, not always, but often enough that no serious, good artist teaching in an art school or university art department trusts AP scores on studio-art portfolios. More often than not, when I have students in my beginning or intermediate drawing courses who received high AP studio portfolio scores, it takes me almost the whole semester to rid them of the havoc wreaked on their artistic sensibility by their high-school art courses. And when I ask students to show me the high-school work that earned them their high AP grade, I invariably see clichéd still-life drawings lacking any sense of asymmetrical balance, perception-based drawings of a boot or a sneaker that contain obsessive details while having no involvement with the picture plane, and hyper-accurate photorealist pencil renderings of grandmothers, barns, or rock-album covers.
I don’t out and out blame any particular faculty members who join these AP Studio Art Exam Reading committees. Instead, I blame the AP system, at least as it pertains to the fine arts. Any approach to assessing the quality of a young artist’s work that runs 29,000 portfolios through a week-long “assessment” mill is, on the face of it, crazy. It’s insulting to both the young aspiring artists and the larger cultural endeavor known as art.
