Figuring the final grades for students in my beginning painting course was unusually difficult this semester. The class was chock full of energetic, hard-working students who wanted to learn what I had to teach. Each of them worked with intense focus and intelligence while in class, and put in long hours outside of class. And even though there wasn’t a ton of natural talent, there was enough that it set the bar high for the course. Those without much natural talent figured their situation out almost immediately, but none were the least bit deterred.
My course included a midterm exam and a museum paper, and required excellent attendance. It centered on the completion of five painting projects, beginning with one that focused on the elements of color and culminating in a fairly complicated still life. Beginning painting projects have very little to do with matters of taste, making grading individual projects not all that difficult. Once you know the purpose of any given project, anyone with a modicum of visual acuity—students included—can almost instantaneously tell the relative merit of an individual painting without parsing it. Still, in a sardonic nod to outcomes-assessment practices, I broke apart each project grade into several components that were graded individually (paint handling, control of tone, control of intensity, chromatic range, compositional control—stuff like that). The components are easily identifiable, but that’s not the point. It remains ridiculous to give them separate grades since works of art are always about a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
Determining the final grade was a different story. A painting professor gets to know students differently from the way professors in academic subjects know their students. We engage in one-on-one conversations about work while it’s in progress, making it possible for us to grasp, on a daily basis, how well our students are internalizing what’s being taught them.
Moreover, although my students often work quietly, there are times when we talk as a class about all sorts of topics. This semester, I had several biology majors in my course (the study of painting and biology is curiously similar—that topic requires its own post), which made me bring up in class Jonah Lehrer’s recent New Yorker article on the “decline effect” that’s currently nibbling at the solidity of the scientific method. We talked a lot about music (my students introduced me to their favorite groups, and I, in turn, introduced them to Handel and George Jones), and movies and books (when I urged them to read Jane Austen, the silence was, as they say, deafening). What does this have to do with grading and painting, you ask? Well, nothing to do with grading, but everything to do with painting. Painters without deep and wide references to the world around us almost invariably lack the gravitas to make intelligent paintings.
I often tell my students that within a year they’ll forget whatever grade I give them, and that in five years they won’t remember any grades in any of their courses. And I tell them that if they’re still vexing over grades a decade from now, that will be a sure sign they need counseling. Yet the moment of a final grade in a course is not a small matter. It generates anxiety for students as well as for professors who take the act of judgment seriously. Rough and imperfect though they are, grades function as a form of justice, the meting out of which is a solemn occasion.
After all the friendliness and soft competition in a studio course, students are often shocked when it’s time for judgment. It’s not so much the actual grade, but that there’s any grade at all. “What? What’s all this? Isn’t the quality of art a relative matter? What’s with this nice lady who spent the semester bantering about color intensity and tonality and how if I’d paint wet-next-to-wet more it would make my apple look more round now giving me a grade?”
The answer is that the time has come. A final grade must be given. A judgment must be made. This, dear students, is life.
3 Responses to The Justice of Grading Painting Students
wbgleason - December 18, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Your essay made me think of long ago. When I was in high school I took an art class from a monk who also taught the college art class. He was extremely talented and later left the monastery. Eventually he became a faculty member and finally the dean at a decent art school. But I remember that he often asked us what grade we would assign to some of the college student paintings. He also worked on a mural and asked for suggestions, some of which he actually took. He seemed to have some odd faith in the judgments about art of the relatively naive and untutored. I would much rather grade an organic chemistry exam than have to assign a letter grade to a painting.
Oh, and by the by. I thought that the Lehrer article was a little misleading, at least the subhead for the New Yorker article, about weaknesses in the scientific method in general. For plenty of work – for example the determination of the crystal structure of a molecule – the wanting it to be true effect is not really a problem. Clinical drug trials? An entirely different matter.
pocvecem - December 18, 2010 at 6:49 pm
Unfortunately, I couldn’t read the full New Yorker article because I am not a subscriber. Please correct me if I am wrong (because I could only view the first part), but it seems that Lehrer is describing something that is hardly new. The replacement of scientific theories with others with greater objective proof is fairly common as I understand it. (Sorry TIND, I am about to go parsing again.) There is a difference between describing this as something that undermines the concept of objectivity and as something that forces us to question whether some of the things we hold as objectively true might not be so true in the first place. It’s kind of the same thing Bill Gleason mentioned and it sounds like the article borders on what we see in typical misinterpretations of Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Again, I couldn’t read the full article so my characterization of it might be wildly off.
Outside of that, it’s interesting to see this article mentioned in a column on painting. I agree with Fendrich that there’s a lot more to the validity of a painting than a list of rubrics. I rather like her idea of broadening the students’ horizons (and her own, I might add) in the service of artistry. It’s a good use of class time because it teaches students what is necessary for them to be able to ask important questions with their art.
For now, I’ll just look forward to that post comparing painting and biology.
j_hamlyn - December 20, 2010 at 10:27 am
That’s the voice of unexamined orthodoxy speaking. Yes this is “life” as you call it (or “the real world” as others think of it too. However, the point that needs to be scrutinised very carefully is whether it could be different, or even better? The creation of art is very much an expression of this belief (faith even) in the power of creativity to transform experience. If we are simply to accept the status quo, as your article seems to suggest your students should, then what point is there to make art at all?
Rewards and punishments (of which grades are a common form) of all kinds are corrosive to creativity. This has been shown in numerous studies conducted across cultures and generations (lookup intrinsic motivation or check out the research and writings of Alfie Kohn).
Your article says more about your own acceptance of grades as unavoidable (“a final grade must be given”) than it does about your students naïveté in the face of life. They, on the contrary, seem to understand, if only intuitively, that there’s some hypocrisy at work in the way their treated. You’d do well to examine your “dear” students’ shock a little more carefully. Perhaps then you’d realise that it is not “life” they are dealing with so much as ‘an institution’ and there is nothing inevitable about that, only what we unquestioningly accept as being so.
http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.com/2010/09/fall-from-grades.html