“Excrement! That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard! We’re not laying pipe! We’re talking about poetry. How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? ‘I like Byron, I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it!’”-John Keating from Dead Poets Society
Dead Poets Society is about an English teacher, John Keating, at a prestigious prep school who pushed his students to break from the conformity of their world and to find themselves through poetry and literature. The very first scene in which Keating interacts with his students is an explosive one. On the first day of classes the boys have already resigned themselves to the dull and boring curriculum propagated by the rest of the school, when Keating walks in. He commands the boys to open their poetry books and to read the essay entitled “Understanding Poetry.”  The essay essentially presents a rubric/scale for rating the quality of a poem. Keating then instructs his students to rip the essay from their books.
The scenario with Keating presents an interesting question; does an evaluation based on a rubric present a true reflection of the quality of the piece? The basic principle behind the existence of rubrics is to create a universal system of judgment.  The assumption with this principle is that a rubric, like the one presented in Dead Poets Society, can be applied across the field, or all poetry. This implies that in order to be of quality something must adhere to the rubric.
But Frost and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz do not fit the same points on the rubric and yet they are both considered poetic masters. If one were to receive high marks the other would surely fail. Just as Mr. Keating pointed out, the rubric does not apply where poetry or art is concerned. Well, Picasso gets points for creativity but he just has no idea how to do a portrait and Dalí has a nice use of color but no sense of proper form. The Beatles have a very catchy rhythm but offer nothing of substance and Etta James has a powerful voice but she doesn’t score well overall. Fitzgerald is vague and too caught up in the sound of his words and Nabakov is too sexual. Al Pacino should only play gangsters and Sidney Poitier should only play “black” roles.
These men and women changed their crafts and challenged the stereotypes, the so-called rubrics of their day. The aforementioned artists revolutionized everything that was perfectly acceptable. Whether you like it or not, art has never been the same since Picasso, movies changed because of Poitier, and literature transformed because of Nabakov’s Lolita. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are both considered to be great bands. Yet a comparison between the two is absurd. They are so different and unique in their own way, to try and rate them utilizing the same scale is ludicrous. So if great art can’t be critiqued with a simplistic rubric, why is our education and the way we learn, an infinitely complex process, graded based on a rubric?
In education rubrics are a way of life. There are history rubrics and English rubrics, and even TOK rubrics. There is seemingly no end to the number of charts I have seen that determine for me what is and is not of quality, the assumption being that I or the individual grading the work, is not capable of understanding “quality” work without some sort of guideline. This in turn implies that those who create the rubrics are more capable and more aware of what is quality than the rest of us.  Rubrics are created in attempt to set some sort of standard because there is an inherent lack of faith in the individual’s ability to grade objectively. But objective grading is not that end all be all it appears to be.
A while ago, as an assignment in my Theory of Knowledge class, I had to grade two sample essays. I remember when discussing the grade of the second essay the class gave it abysmally low marks, as did the IB graders. They all adhered to the rubric. Yet I have to confess there was something profoundly brutal in their assessment. When I read the paper and forgot about the rubric, I saw a valiant effort to create a paper about a subject the author was genuinely interested in. In my eyes there certainly could have been improvements but I did not think as a response to the prompt the paper was of a drastically poor quality.  Perhaps I would not have minded so much if I did not know the stock we put in the ability of rubrics to grade quality. Rubrics make it easy, hit points A, B, and C and you get a good grade, if you miss them you fail. God forbid should we ever encourage children to deviate from the beaten path or that we should use our minds to judge quality for ourselves.
Is there a rubric for ethics or are they prey to the subjective nature of a person’s individuality? What happens when we do create rubrics for things like ethics, we get laws, laws that do not allow for the unique scenario that is every human being’s life. We create laws to protect us, to keep people in line, but maybe there’s a problem with the rubric when we have two million people in prison and no sign of reduction. Have we become so lazy as to look at crime strictly though a rubric with no consideration for the human life we are dealing with? Can one view history through a rubric? Well, Mao killed 70 million and Hitler only 11 million so, as far as the rubric goes, Mao is far more evil than Hitler. If you could find one Holocaust survivor that agrees with that statement I would be shocked.  But that’s the sort of “fact,” the kind of answer that our societal rubrics perpetuate.
I understand the purpose of rubrics. They offer control and provide us students with a feeble sense of comfort, “As long as I stick to the rubric I’ll get a good grade.” The attempt to reduce opinion and to focus on a concrete idea of what is right and wrong, what is acceptable and what is not. Well the world is not black and white but a whole smattering of different shades of grey. A rubric cannot be applied to art, to history, to ethics, so why then do we apply it to our education, the very building blocks of our intellectual originality. If we don’t have enough faith in our teachers to be fair without rubrics, how can we ever expect our children to believe in themselves and to think outside the box? If we stop encouraging ourselves to break the mold how can we as a species ever hope to grow?