| > I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. > It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. The earliest reference I am aware of is the 1985 book "Art and Fear", at the beginning of the section on perfection: https://books.google.com/books?id=yGf6CAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA77&vq=c... The book doesn't have footnotes or a bibliography, unfortunately. I think people take away only part of the lesson from this anecdote, and miss the implication that, since getting an "A" was trivial for the "grade by quantity" group, students were not just encouraged to practice, but were also free to experiment without fear of failure (after all, they could easily make up any shortfall by firing a few unworked lumps of clay to get to 50 lbs). But I wish we had data on the number of students, distribution of grades, number of pieces each student made, etc. because it should be obvious that we can't extrapolate too much from the fact that some data points on the "high quality" end of the distribution were all from one group. The three best? Ten best? The best half? What was the size of the class anyway? Did anyone try to game the system by just firing 50 one-pound lumps? In some sense, this is a bit like evaluating software based on SLOC, and we all know how that ends up. It should also be obvious that none of the students had any particular incentive to explore the "delicate" end of the possible artistic design space, although at least the "quantity" group wasn't penalized for doing so. So, if no students cottoned on to the "50 1-pound lumps" hack, I would expect to see coffee mugs rather than teacups in their work. |