“On the first day of our graduate class, I felt the students breathe a collective sigh of relief when someone said, “Even though I have a rubric, I ofen find myself fudging the rubric to give the student the grade she deserves.” – Gates, L. (2017). Embracing the subjective in assessment: Recommendations for art educators. Art Education, 70(1), 23-28.
“As an early career teacher, I once insisted to a professional mentor that creativity could not be assessed. He said, “There’s got to be a way to assess creativity because as art teachers, we know it when we see it. We are already assessing it in our observations of students. What’s difficult is describing it to others.” I now agree that creativity can and should be assessed (e.g., Wiggins, 2012) if this is one of the things we claim to teach. As I see it, one of the main tasks of art educators in our generation is to embrace the struggle of describing the messy and untidy learning in art education classrooms in order to formalize it for those outside of our classrooms/ field.” – Gates, L. (2017). Embracing the subjective in assessment: Recommendations for art educators. Art Education, 70(1), 23-28.
“One bias, therefore, is our tendency to forget that we are not actually measuring learning, we are measuring a proxy for learning.” – Wees, D. (2013, June 11). Bias in assessment. https://davidwees.com/content/bias-assessment/
What did I learn?
In the Wees article, Bias In Assessment, the author asks us to question our bias when we determine even the format of our rubric/assessment. I admit I have not fully considered this before. I have two sections of the same course in the fall and it might be worth trying two different formats for the rubrics/assessments. Some students prefer writing and others might prefer digital format. Both could be used but I would be interested in seeing a comparison and/or offering both options to a class.
I think a lot of the discussions of objectivity vs. subjectivity within the art classroom go back to our discussions on writing clear, specific objectives. The majority of the articles are making me rethink my daily/lesson learning objectives so that I’m assessing what I intend for students to learn over the course of a unit. When I am writing and revising a rubric, I should consider what happened in the Young article – to make my criteria accessible to the student or as we discussed in the last class – make the learning visible. Creating criteria on the rubric that directly relates to what the student is to achieve and does make sense but with art, we don’t always do it.
Objectivity is sort of universal truth – subjectivity is based more on personal bias. Chris Staley gave a great synopsis of what factors we grade/critique art. The four C’s: craft, creativity, content, and composition. Interestingly enough I tend to use similar criteria in a rubric but I still intend to tweak the specific criteria to achieve these factors.
Question: Should we be finding a way to be equally objective and subjective?
Additional Resource: Medium Article – To Be Truthful, Art is Not Subjective
Assessment in Art Education 
Thanks for this interesting article. I’m currently trying to figure how much we might want to talk about bias in class tomorrow. I think bias (and all of our thinking about it) is one reason we get into the subjectivity/objectivity issues in our field.
Leslie