The Problem with Grades in Art & Creative Writing Classes

Grades provide an incentive. It’s not their only purpose, but let’s be honest: for a lot of students, an A is the carrot at the end of the stick that is the course. Grades help to create the conditions for students to be engaged and do their best work—right?  

Maybe that’s true for some classes. But in classes where students are expected to do creative work, grades may actually have a harmful effect on student work. 

In general, if people are expecting that their creativity output is going to be judged or evaluated, they are less creative (Amabile, 1979, 1996) and they feel less competent (King & Gurland, 2007).

Creativity 101, James C. Kaufman

So that’s the bad news. 

Now here’s the worse news. 

“[N]eurotic, introverted people did particularly poorly when they thought their work would be evaluated.” 

Creativity 101, James C. Kaufman

But wait: It gets worse. 

[T]here may be a key gender difference in evaluation and creativity. J. Baer (1997) asked eighth-graders to write original poems and stories and either told them they wouldn’t be evaluated or that they would be (and emphasized the evaluation). The poems and stories were rated using the Consensual-Assessment Technique, and there was a significant gender-by-motivational-interaction effect. For boys, there was virtually no difference in creativity ratings under (either condition), but for the girls these differences were quite large.   

Creativity 101, James C. Kaufman (emphasis mine)

Taken all together, here’s one possible meaning: the system of giving grades in creative classes favors confident, extroverted boys. 

Do we really need one more fucking system that favors this group?

Do we really want to reinforce this part of the status quo?

I don’t. 

But I also can’t pretend to have a neat and tidy solution. If I tell my university that I’m going to stop giving grades in my creative writing classes, they’ll say, Cool. We’ll stop giving you paychecks. 

My bosses might have a similar reaction if I told them I was going to give all my students an automatic A, as Michael Martone does at the University of Alabama.

I am fortunate that I “teach” elective classes. The writers who sign up, sign up, I assume, because they want to write . . . On the first day I tell them they all get an “A” (there is nothing they can do to change that). I also tell them that they may find this class difficult. I point out to them that what all their schooling has mainly taught them to do is try to figure out as soon as possible what I want so they can get what they have been taught to want, an “A.”

But, I tell them, and this is the difficult part, I don’t want anything.

I will have several students drop when confronted with the problem of having to know what they want.

It has been a huge relief and quite generative to practice this kind of experiential learning. I no longer worry the control of the class, using carrots and stick of grades to promote behavior, to motivate them. Control means to roll against. I am rolling with. I give free rein, and I am along for the ride.

Magical Thinking: A Conversation with Michael Martone by Kristina Marie Darling, Tupelo Quarterly

I could ask students to do a certain amount of work and to judge them on whether they’ve completed that work—but completion ain’t engagement, and engagement is what I’m after. 

Clearly, I don’t have any answers here. Maybe you can help me think of some. For now, I think it’s important to recognize who this system favors (the same guys it always favors), who is getting ground under its wheels (everyone else), and to start looking for the reset button. 

4 thoughts on “The Problem with Grades in Art & Creative Writing Classes

  1. I ask students to reflect on creative projects; I ask them specifically about choices they made and why they made them. I also ask about how reading, viewing, and other acts of intertextuality may have affected choices. Essentially, I’m trying to encourage reading like a writer.

    I also ask students to revisit their reflections as they go thru the process of developing creative work (my creative assignment has four steps; students reflect at each one). I then ask them to consider their earlier reflections in later reflections.

    Basically, given the nature of my class, I am trying to develop and encourage writerly behaviors, with emphasis on the depth of though that underpins composing and revising.

  2. Yes, yes, yes to all this! As a neurotic, introverted female I am terrified of being judged and evaluated, which has definitely restricted my creativity. It didn’t help either when parents, teachers, professors, even fellow students told me I was a “good writer.” Years of this sort of praise has left me with no permission to write anything bad – another restriction on creativity. Maybe instead of evaluating the product of creative learning (stories, poems, etc.), we need to evaluate the process of learning. Students determine what they want to learn, set goals and a game plan for reaching them, and a self-evaluation at the end of the course analyzing what all they have learned. The actual creative writing then is simply a tool to help them achieve their learning goals rather than a product to be evaluated.

    1. I love this—not only your story that jibes with the research, but also the idea of a self-charted course. The more agency, the better.

      Thanks!

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