The Beached Whale

I had an interesting experience recently in a video class I’m taking right now, and it definitely made me think about Nelson’s ideas of how the current, regulated system of education harms and slows the learning process in some ways rather than fostering it.

For an assignment, I had to shoot a short video project, including certain parameters.  Just about everybody was shooting their videos on and around the Baylor campus and I wanted to do something different and unusual to set my video apart.  I filmed my whole video in front of greenscreen and composited digital backgrounds to create a sort of futuristic cold war setting for my chase scene.  Though I was definitely trying to make a video opposite what I knew the professor would expect from us, I was very careful to include all the requirements.  I put way more time and effort into my film than was expected of us, because it was very ambitious and I was willing to work a little harder to show what I’m capable of.

When we showed our videos in class, everybody including the professor was very impressed by my video and enjoyed it.  The other videos were good too, of course, but basically stuck to the requirements for a short chase scene.  I was pretty confident that, given I was careful to meet the requirements, I was going to get a good grade on the assignment.

I ended up getting an 80%, far below the average grade in the class for this project.  I knew the video wasn’t perfect, but I hadn’t expected this.  There were two primary reasons I was graded down.  Because of some stylized color effects in the video, it wasn’t clear if I had properly white balanced or not, though I had.  Also, the professor didn’t see the beginning and end of the ‘chase’ segment of the video in the way I had defined it when making the video, so he graded it down for not being long enough.  I explained both of these issues to him afterward and he was very complementary of the video but insisted that he was just grading based on meeting the requirements.

I don’t have hard feelings for the professor over this, but it definitely reminded me of the downside of the current education system that we’ve been discussing in class.  I put 110% into my project and tried to think outside the box while still meeting the requirements for the class and because this made my integration of the requirements less obvious, I got a worse grade than people who cut their videos together in the last 24 hours before the deadline.

What lesson does this teach a student?  To me it seems the lesson is to do what is expected.  There’s some room for creativity within this boundary, just don’t go too far.  Perhaps the fact that the professor and other people recognized the added effort and were impressed by the result should be enough, but grades are important and if I had to do this over I would certainly go for something more conventional that would take half the time and get me a better grade.  As a result, I’m likely to shoot for exactly what will get me the grade (a less beneficial endeavor, other than the getting a good grade part, though I’ve learned plenty of other important stuff in the class) and only really experiment in projects that I’m making on my own.  It makes me see projects like this one as a sort of ’standardized test’ of knowledge, which just isn’t what I was expecting.  Whether it is really a bad thing to use assignments like this to test for specific, general knowledge is debatable.

I’m sure some people would defend against this criticism with something to the effect that “In the real world, you have to produce exactly what your client wants and expects from you.”  True, but I don’t think that’s really applicable to this situation because the parameters were very minimal, and in an educational setting free thought and creativity should be encouraged – school assignments aren’t work on commission.

~ by philip on April 15, 2009. Tagged: baylor_nms_s09