Art is inherently subjective, but as a school course, it needs to be graded. What determines how “good” a piece of art is? How is art, which defies perfect categorization, sorted into groups of “A”s and “B”s?
Bill Colburn ’88, the visual arts teacher, jokes about grading, ìI have this hat, and inside the hat there is one A, two B’s, three C’s.”
Colburn’s actual grading process takes into consideration three major factors: the specific skills or techniques covered in the unit, the effort the student put into the piece, and the work done preparing the final piece.
For the technique component, Colburn uses charts to track the application of the skills for larger assignments. For the effort component, grading looks a little different. “That’s tricky to put down in a chart,” Colburn says. “However, we do our work in class,…[so] I see the effort everyday.” The third component in Colburn’s grading is the work done leading up to a major assignment. He remarks, “Your grade is ultimately coming from not just, ‘Is the final [work] successful in terms of the things we’ve been working on’ and ‘Am I seeing effort,’ but ‘Am I seeing the sort of stuff that led up to it?'”
Brian Sago, another visual arts teacher, provides his view on the grading system: “Way more information is relayed in a short narrative statement than in a letter grade,” he says. “Letter grades are a shorthand to give a fast idea of a state of progress.” Sago follows similar grading principles to Colburn in how his grades are based on a rubric, with categories encompassing technical skill, academic expectations (e.g. work turned in in a timely manner), written and discussion components, and student vision. “Arts classes shouldn’t be graded,” Sago says, but since they are, “[W]e try to build into our grading rubrics a balance of objective things and subjective things that can be assessed.”
