Text: Learning outcomes and assessment criteria in art and design. What’s the recurring problem?
This is a body of text I found really interesting to look through, especially as I just finished marking all of my CCP unit 7 ‘Co-Lab’ Students this morning!
Last year during another co-lab project I was running ‘The Godzilla suit project’ I had a bit of a fiasco during the marking section, specifically making sure the marking I did WASN’T holistic but based entirely on the student language during the submission. I did all the marking from a more holistic standpoint, what had the student learned? Did they explore a new technique? Where they a collaborative team mate? How was the quality of the finished piece? When my marks were sent out to parity I was rather reprimanded for not being objective enough, which in hindsight I wasn’t. I hadn’t treated the marking as an evidence-based reflection of the hand-in the student had submitted, I didn’t reference the LO’s and ensure the marking was based entirely on the use of language in the submission and if they’d ‘Ticked the boxes’ of each LO. This is a very fair point, we have to be held up to an institution-wide objective list of criteria so that the students can rest assured that their grades are fair, researched backed, and can withstand parity checks.
This year I’ve corrected for that behaviour and focused entirely on the LO’s within the submission itself as a stand-alone entity, but as I was reading this text I felt a pang of desire and familiarity. I so want to be more holistic within my marking, when a student learns something new and I can see the progress they’ve made I want that to be part of their marking criteria. It’s a frustration to make sure they’ve used the correct language in their submission so that their accomplishment can actually be rewarded. I also lament pure quality being a meaningful contributor to a grade, if a student sculpts and finishes something beautifully I want to be able to reward them for that accomplishment, again I feel frustrated that I have to hope they used the right language in a submission in order to give them their deserved reward.
But that being said, holistic marking, as the paper says, must be kept as a part of marking, not the main focus. If it becomes a main focus a tutor can become dangerously biased to interpersonal relationships between the student, for example, ‘I can see their progress from the last unit! They didn’t submit as much as another student but they deserve an A!’ can be a dangerous road to go down in regards to not only parity but overall student satisfaction. The students want an A to be an A, a universal standard and not something based on personal subjective markers which change from student to student,
Overall I appreciate this paper for trying to bridge the impossible gap, how on earth do you mark art? I think we owe our students an objective standpoint, so despite my desire for a pure technical quality set of marking criteria that can only be accomplished through sheer skill and dedication, I think the way things are now is actually for the best. I like my marks being based on evidence and research, I like knowing I could send them to another tutor and they’d look at the evidence within the submission and agree/disagree in objective terms.
This I fear is the last time you’ll hear me agree with the status quo, please savor it.
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