When you look at some eighth-grader’s botched drawing of an anime character, how do you know it’s bad art? And when you look at a professional’s abstract piece, characterized by messy streaks of paint and randomly placed splotches, how do you know it’s good art? Maybe because one hangs on a museum wall and one sits on the desk of a middle-school art teacher. Maybe. Or maybe there’s just something inside you that tells you Sailor Moon’s eyes shouldn’t be bigger than her face.

The truth is, we all judge art based on our personal preferences, and that’s fair enough. But in the position of an art grader, how does one critique using an objective standard, without imposing personal biases?

Rubrics that are supposedly unbiased often favor realistic art, as it is easier to judge against a standard compared to stylized art. There’s an exact way to pinpoint a student’s success: how accurate is the drawing to real life?

This is why, in academic spaces, realism is encouraged. It’s often seen as a necessary skill to develop in order to become an “artist.”

It’s no surprise, then, that senior artist Alexis Young, who has been taking art classes since she was little, has naturally developed a taste for realism. Alternatively, Nora Rubin, who taught herself how to draw, has become an artist with a more ‘cartoonish’ style: “an attack on paper.”

While these foundational institutions may encourage artists to conform to realism, art schools tend to discard this aesthetic as “unoriginal.” This creates a confusing message for artists navigating through their educational careers.

So, what makes art graders prefer one style over the other? Rubin explains a common critique of stylized artwork is that it’s “unable to convey complexity or emotion.” She argues that this belief is narrow-minded, asking these realistic-style artists, “Why limit your art solely to what’s conceivable?”

Others say realistic art, more often than not, fails to capture reality, inevitably becoming an idealized version of what is really in front of us. We extract just enough realism out of life’s images to put onto a canvas, as to avoid creating something unbeautiful.

With such strong opinions circulating throughout the art community, how have professional graders managed to avoid these biases?

Tinashe Vincent, an art teacher at East, explains that before 2020, AP art students had to “crank out 24 masterpieces” by the end of the school year for digital submission. Now, there is more emphasis on progress requiring evidence of experimentation and revision. With this rubric, focused on the journey rather than the outcome, the potential for bias is eliminated, but at the expense of any credit for technical skill or aesthetics. It seems impossible to formulate the perfect rubric for art, but maybe that’s because art was never meant to be judged with mathematical formulas and limiting rubrics.

Thousands of years before written language was developed, our ancestors relied on art to transform thought into something concrete and understandable, communicating abstract messages that words could not sufficiently describe.

And after all these years, art serves the same purpose: expressing the seemingly inexpressible. The means through which an artists does this may look different, but this diversity is something to be appreciated.

Of course, art needs to be graded in order for art education to exist. So what do we do? We should reward artists who express passion through their craft, pour effort into their work and who are not afraid to try new things. This cannot be judged through a digital submission of photographs and written explanations, or by a final product tossed on your desk. To understand the actual grade an artist deserves, you must observe their process carefully and witness first-hand their dedication to their project. This is the way to.