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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
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Recent Posts
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Featured Articles By the Author
The AP Studio Art Assessment Mill
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 The invitation to participate was almost immediately rescinded, however, since a few sentences later it was modified by, “We welcome applications from faculty at your institution.”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.
Posted at 11:58:02 AM on December 13, 2007 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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I’d find this argument far more persuasive if you’d actually had spent a week help to evaluate portfolios and shared your experiences. As written, the argument is based on your perceptions of the process yet you provide no evidence that you really understand the evaluation process.
— Marty · Dec 14, 07:32 AM · #
Don’t know whether things are still done like this, but to give you an idea of how pointless the AP Art portfolio process is, up until a couple of years ago (and possibly, still done this way) the portfolio was submitted as a pack of 35mm slides which were not projected in a proper setting, but held up to the light slide-by-slide! Incredible. And, of course, designed by the AP industry to be one more “valuable” credential for students and their pushy parents who really should get a life instead. Now if we just had a system to identify talent the way high school basketball players are ushered into the big leagues . . . .
— Eric Berman · Dec 14, 08:05 AM · #
One of the more interesting routes to entry into the world of being an artist is having nincompoops, barely glance, with prejudice in tact, at your portfolio, then judge its “quality” rather than judging their own “quality”. Starting out in a profession via such jokes, while good for the humor, is bad for the morale. It teaches arbitrariness, and caprice, and thereby it also teaches disrespect for the evaluation mechanisms of the profession itself. History is the ultimate evaluator and all others are stand ins for that. Nincompoopy stand ins are jokes—a la 29,000 things glanced at by unmotivated professionals.
At least budding artists learn not to trust their seniors in the profession—a valuable lesson indeed.!!!
— Richard Tabor Greene · Dec 14, 09:27 AM · #
As both a parent and an educator, I have many bones to pick with the College Board — and their communication style is one of those bones. Last fall, I received a mass e-mail with the outrageous subject line of , “Get Your Child Noticed!” The attached message was merely info from the Board on how and when to register your child for SAT exams. They appeared to be playing today’s culture of parental anxiety over their kids’ achievements and college prospects. It is both odd and shameless that the Board would choose this media message given their behemoth corner on the educational testing market. With their ever-expanding AP program, I am concerned about the Board being incorrectly annoited with the role of the ultimate branders of high school curricular quality. There is a movement afoot among some top high schools (private and public) to keep AP programs out of their schools.
I could writes tons (good and not so good) about my daughter’s experience with AP studio art, but for now I’ll just share the stunning consensus that I heard at a forum of admissions recruiters from Art+Design Schools — “The best AP Studio Art portfolio makes the worst merit scholarship portfolio for admission to colleges of art+design.”
— Lisa · Dec 14, 01:02 PM · #
The AP system is based on a problematic premise. The idea that college level subjects can be taught before college supposes that the content is very similar if not identical. As an art professor I find there to be a profound difference both technically and conceptually between any college level and high school level course. Students are contextualized by the student body they are a part of and the collective experience and discussion that takes place in a college level studio course will never be an equivalent to the AP course. Perhaps in other academic fields this is not the case but I will almost never allow an incoming freshman to place out of an entry level studio art course, they never regret it.
— Mercedes · Dec 27, 09:32 AM · #