hmmm, wtf?

I don't know what to say about this. We got our portfolios back today. Do you ever feel as though everything in the world has been shaken up, turned upside down, dumped out, and then put back in the wrong order? Maybe it was an aftershock of the full moon, I don't know.

For those of you who don't know what's going on, I've spent the past 10 months fully immersed in photography studies - in the form of a "professional photography program". An interesting experience to be sure. I'm going to look at the positive side of it for the moment (a rarity for me, I know) and not comment on the amount of money it has eaten up.

Anyhooo, our final assignment was, not surprisingly, a portfolio. 20 prints, 4 prints in each of 5 categories (still trying to avoid being miss negativity - not going to comment on the problems associated with a portfolio of such configurations), marked by three professional photographers who are not in any way associated with the program. In other words, not marked by any of the professional photographers who were our instructors. A good plan to be sure. Leads to some issues though, namely that we're pretty darn used to getting good marks. I don't think they were necessarily inflated...just that we, as students, were learning what we needed to be learning and meeting the expectations of our instructors. That's a good thing.

Enter 3 professional photographers acting as adjudicators. Now comes the sticky part. What criteria do you mark on? Essentially we're finished the program; we should capable, though inexperienced. School gives you knowledge, and some degree of competence. Expertise comes from practise and experience. Obviously we can't expect to be at that point. So what's a pass, and whats a fail, and what's really good, or even exceptional? And how do you change the expectations at the end of a course without taking sufficient time to explain thats what you're doing?

Needless to say our portfolio marks were not what we expected. Again, I suspect they were fair, just marked on a different set of expectations,and we didn't know what those were. My educated guess (based on the comment that a portrait of mine given a 2.5 out of 5 was "sellable") is that anything 2.5 or more was of acceptable professional quality. By that reasoning I figure a 5 is excellent - the sort of work expected of experienced professionals. Or maybe this is just my justification for getting 71%.

Now, back to that whole mixed up world thing.

Um, yeah. We've spent 10 months together, we know who does what sort of work, how consistently, and how well. We saw the majority of the work going into everyone's portfolio. Other than everyone not expecting the top mark to be their own, we could probably come to a pretty good consensus of the contenders for the top 25% of our class. Until we started comparing portfolio marks. Never mind the fact that a third of the class got 55%. Never mind the fact that in the majority of instances if Paul said to put something in and we thought we shouldn't we turned out to be right and were marked poorly on those prints Paul told us to include. Never mind the fact that Paul told us to be consistent in the size of photos that we included and the adjudicators said we should have cropped according to the subject (which is of course what we would have done if we had thought we were "allowed"). In the end none of the marks made much sense...our most fav fellow and our least fav fellow are NOT equal in their photographic ability. Nobody (but the least fav fellow perhaps), would argue that they are. But somehow they ended up with the same mark. WTF?

And to go somewhere I really shouldn't with this; what does a top class portfolio mark of 71% mean for the program? Did I mention that they went back over the first half of the books and re-adjudicated them because they thought they might be being to harsh? Yup, funny, Paul agreed that 4 people failing (that's a third of the class btw) was a bit "harsh". Hmmmm, imagine that. Too harsh for us? Or too harsh a comment on the program? "His" program.



Comments:
Matt: Those fucks don't know what they're thinking!
Marc: Yeah, that's a total wtf. I like the idea of having professionals come in and *commenting* on your final portfolio, but marking them? I don't think so. That's like saying "You've been graded by this set of criteria all program long. Now, for your final project, you'll be graded on this other set of criteria that we're not going to tell you about." Bulllllcrap. But still, congrats on getting top marks. I know it wasn't the way you would have preferred to get them, but it's still pretty cool. (http://spaces.msn.com/members/eloosive/)