Does Advanced Art Portfolio Count as an Ap Class
Fine art Portfolio every bit A.P. Test
Here is an unhappy thought: "Monet wouldn't accept washed well in A.P. studio art. I'm sure of that." The reason, continued Lauren Sleat, who teaches the form at Westminster Schools in Atlanta, is that there isn't much latitude to his work. That is, he did the aforementioned thing over again and once more.
Only he would take washed well in terms of concentration, what the College Board describes equally "the thoughtful investigation of a specific visual idea … through a number of conceptually related works." Concentration and breadth are two of iii categories in which students' fine art portfolios are scored. One might expect Monet to score high in the 3rd, quality, but the fact is, it took years for his piece of work to exist widely appreciated.
At present, Picasso is different. "Picasso would have scored very high," Ms. Sleat said, because he could practise traditional figurative work, modernist still life and abstract art in a variety of media — the whole parcel. Or, in College Board speak, Picasso would have earned a five on his portfolio.
It's strange to picture famous artists struggling to get a good score in a high schoolhouse fine art class. Merely unlike United states of america history or Latin or calculus, there are no right or wrong answers in Advanced Placement studio fine art. Students are tested not by their mastery of the material just by their skill, a far more subjective area of evaluation. "Readers" must make judgments about competence and inventiveness as they work their fashion through some 48,000 portfolios of pupil artwork. That's more double the number submitted a decade earlier.
Advanced Placement, run by the College Board, offers loftier school students college-level work, and the possibility of college credit for those who pass the exam in May. Studio art is one of the fastest growing of the A.P. disciplines, and has become a transcript staple in the applicant puddle for Bachelor of Fine Arts programs at independent fine art colleges. "Maybe 25 to 30 percent of our applicants have washed A.P. in high school," said Linda Schwab, managing director of admissions at Watkins College of Art, Blueprint and Motion picture in Nashville.
Only the growth does not necessarily signal creative aspirations. According to a 2007 survey by the College Lath, but almost xiii percent of the students major in fine art. So why take A.P. studio? To endeavour to print a college admissions office, of course, or peradventure to make a residuum stop along the academic autobahn or, maybe, art really is a labor of love.
WHAT IS STUDIO ART, ANYWAY?
The art program comes in three yearlong options: drawing (which also encompasses painting and printmaking), 2-D design (graphic and digital pattern; photography) and 3-D design (sculpture and crafts).
Much is required. For drawing and 2-D portfolios, for example, students must submit 24 works: 12 in a breadth section, showing a variety of subjects, visual concepts and techniques, and 12 in the concentration section, presenting a unified body of work (all portraits, say) and ideas. V works are highlighted as indications of quality, revealing agreement of concept, composition and execution and overall accomplishment.
As much as high school teachers will seek to give their students the rigor of a college class, time is a factor in A.P. courses that is difficult to get effectually. Studio art classes in college generally last 2 or 3 hours, sometimes longer, while high school fine art remains a fifty-infinitesimal affair, with the last 10 minutes devoted to cleanup.
"Y'all don't become a lot washed in class," said Deborah Callahan, chairwoman of the art department of Longmeadow Loftier School, in Massachusetts. "So twice a calendar month, nosotros keep the art room open from 2:15 to 8 p.m." Several other A.P. fine art teachers relayed the aforementioned thing. Class time is for conversation — critiquing work, learning terms and concepts, watching presentations on contemporary art. The art, the portfolio, is made at home or after school.
Classroom grades reflect an instructor's sense of a educatee's effort and improvement, which the teacher sees on a daily footing. In contrast, the A.P. score — on a one to half-dozen scale for sections, recalibrated to 1 to 5 for the portfolio — is based on the end-of-yr submissions to the College Lath.
The Advanced Placement program in general has been criticized for its focus on a single test — likewise, studio art'southward portfolio. "A.P. studio reveals some of the problems with how much nosotros examination," said Jack Schneider, assistant professor of didactics at the College of the Holy Cantankerous and author of "Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America's Public Schools."
"Slapping a score on a piece of work of art, based on checking off this and this and this, is crazy," he said. "Meeting all the requirements is not what makes a work of art move us."
HOW A PORTFOLIO IS SCORED
The process of evaluating and scoring all those portfolios is monumental, requiring 120-plus readers — an fifty-fifty mix of high school and college fine art instructors who are divided into minor groups that must reach a consensus. They follow a rubric that has been worked out over the years outlining principles of pattern and visual elements. In effect, is the artwork interesting and what are the elements that brand it so? If not, what'due south defective? The rubric is intended to result in an objective assessment of artwork.
A.P. teachers need to know how to teach to that rubric. They need to speak the language — for example, "composition" and "mark-making," the lines, patterns and textures used to create an artwork. Greg W. Shelnutt, chairman of the fine art section at Clemson University in South Carolina and an A.P. reader for five years, explains what he looks at in judging mark-making: "how line is utilized, the weight of the line, where it is thin, where information technology's thick, the movement of the line, the diverseness of marks."
The teachers besides need to know the divergence between an artwork that earns a iv or five or half dozen.
The continuing studies division of the School of the Art Establish of Chicago offers weeklong grooming workshops for A.P. teachers. Maybe half of them accept art degrees, according to Kaye Buchman, old associate director of the division. "We've had the occasional shop or phys ed teacher who are told to teach A.P. studio," she acknowledged. "That's the nature of schoolhouse budget cuts."
The Taft Educational Center in Watertown, Conn., also offers optional A.P. grooming. Instructors may take a class to the nearby Yale Art Gallery "to meet what makes certain paintings good," said the center'south managing director, Al Reiff. They will point out how one student's work compares to another's. Peradventure, he suggested, "the composition is more complex — it draws your middle all over the prototype, while that pupil's image is more than flat."
Barbara Petter Putnam, who has a bachelor's in art didactics and a master's in fine arts, teaches at St. Mark'due south School in Massachusetts, where she prepared for her A.P. studio fine art class past looking at portfolios on the College Board website. "That taught me a lot about what was considered bad and what was considered practiced," said Ms. Putnam. "I gained information through my own eyes." The approach has worked. "In that location is the occasional 4, but virtually all of my students get a five," she said.
While few of her 5s go on to B.F.A. programs, Trevor Packer, senior vice president in charge of Advanced Placement, pointed to a College Lath survey finding: Students who take A.P. studio art are more likely to take an art class or two in college.
Ms. Putnam mentioned another benefit. With students stuffing 5 and six A. P.s into their schedule, offering an A.P. art class is the principal style "to get kids to make room in their schedules for art."
"Otherwise," she said, "they probably wouldn't practise information technology."
Alina Libowitz, a first-year student at the Academy of Delaware with plans to major in either international business or speech linguistic communication pathology, took A. P.s in English, European history and environmental science and found this: "Art was less stressful than my other classes." A.P. studio, she said, was "a lot of work, but it doesn't feel like work."
Her classmate in studio art at Longmeadow Loftier School, Madeline Maurer, took four A. P.s all told. She describes herself as competitive, and wanted the most challenging fine art course available. "I like to go along going upward and upwardly in levels." Besides, she said, it was fun.
WHAT COLLEGES SAY
Fine art academies are receptive to the idea of A.P.-trained applicants. David Sigman, admissions director at the Milwaukee Institute of Fine art and Design, said the courses "put students in line with what we are teaching here." Elizabeth O'Brien, vice president of enrollment at the San Francisco Art Institute, said graduates who take taken A.P. art "tend to do a niggling better than others in their accomplice."
Traditional colleges don't sniff at studio art, either. "Nosotros are very impressed with applicants who take taken that course," said Mary French, associate manager of admissions at Boston College.
Nat Smitobol, an admissions consultant for IvyWise and former assistant director of admissions at New York University, explains why that might be. He calls studio art "a soft A.P.," adding: "But no 1 is penalized for taking it. It shows that a student is seriously interested in art." (He names environmental science and human geography as soft A. P.s that are more apt to be viewed negatively. "Taking those sounds like y'all're dodging A.P. chemistry or biological science.")
David Dickinson, an art teacher at Deerfield Academy, a preparatory schoolhouse in Massachusetts, recommends that his students send their portfolios with their college applications even when not majoring in fine art. "A portfolio is a hook — it grabs their attention — in the aforementioned way that lacrosse is a hook at many colleges, or crew is a claw with the Ivies," he said. "Seeing a portfolio thrills them."
A.P. studio may help bolster an admissions résumé, just it can lack a benefit of many other A. P.southward: Most colleges will not allow a student with a passing score (3, four or 5, depending on the institution) to skip a kickoff-year core course, either because they take cypher comparable or, for art majors, they want all of them to accept the same courses.
"It's not just a skill set we're teaching in foundation," said Mr. Shelnutt about Clemson's core courses. "They are getting inculcated into the culture of the plan." Instead, students may use whatsoever credit they receive for studio art toward an elective. But because virtually art majors want to take electives in their area of interest, information technology isn't likely the credit will exist used.
"A.P. courses are more than a vehicle for higher credence than credit," confirmed Mr. Reiff, whose middle trains instructors in all 35 A.P. disciplines. "They look good on your transcript."
And so he added: "The question I keep asking is, does information technology make sense to bring that kind of mentality to the fine arts? Why not just offer more and better art classes in high school?"
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/education/edlife/art-portfolio-as-ap-test.html
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