Tom Evans – 13th February 2012
This week is anybody’s SCAB, a free for all where we don’t have to take turns to express our opinions but the only criteria for getting a post up is if it’s any good.
The front page of the website states:
We Don’t Care About Your Grades
If you got good grades at school, that’s great. We won’t ask though. We look for people who think a bit differently, are passionate about advertising, and who can string a sentence together. We are always looking for rough diamonds. Love ‘em.
Try as I might this is the one aspect to SCA 2.0′s architecture that I’ve had trouble getting my head round.
Why?
One reason is that I worked hard at school. I got reasonably good grades, they were good enough to get me into one of the country’s leading art and design schools.
Conventional logic suggests that grading students based on effort and achievement at certain key stages is the fairest way to sort the wheat from the chaff and assign opportunity. If you want to be successful you have to work hard and consistently as-well as being bright. Opportunities are finite and the right people deserve to get them.
It seems irrational for an institution that purports to be the best of it’s kind in this field not to care a jot about grades, but furthermore unfair on those who’ve bothered to attain them. Surely if you’re selecting a cohort that you believe will make a contribution to the culture of creativity in the UK over the forthcoming decades and you want the brightest and the best, you would track previous academic performance carefully when considering the intake. I read a Guardian article recently about admissions at Oxbridge which are so fiercely meticulous in looking at grades it’s frightening.
That SCA 2.0 doesn’t ask about attainment is challenging to me and I am not the most conventional of thinkers, but this goes beyond liberal and unorthodox. It would be like betting on a racehorse without looking at their performance over the last ten races surely?
I think I know why they have this policy: The Dean, whose pet project the school is, didn’t get good grades at school, he failed. Marc Lewis will proudly tell audiences when he speaks publicly about how he got straight F’s. …and go on to recount how after winning a scholarship to SCA 1.0 he eventually became a leading .com entraprenuer, which would get anyone thinking. Clearly if it’s possible to make an impact despite failing at school to this extent, I can see why it is important to him to cast the net wider than those with 2.1′s or firsts from the right Russell Group Universities.
I fucked up at University. Well art school. Chelsea College of Art and Design to be precise. I was there to paint. I was kinda interested in the lectures, but I sure as hell wasn’t interested in spending my spare time reading theory and writing essays. Hell no, I was in one of the most exciting cities in the world. I painted dedicatedly, but I didn’t care about grades. My thinking was if people liked my paintings they’d buy them, I didn’t realise of course that the best art dealers visit only the MA shows of about three London Colleges which all graduates compete for a place in. So, when in my final year, 4 days before we were due to hand the thesis in I realised I had to submit ten thousand words on something, I delivered off the top of my head a load of impulsive drivel about a popular Coen brothers movie that would definitely embarrass me to read now dude. It was almost directly taking the piss out of the theory department, art wasn’t about chin stroking theory and latte drinking, bearded, black turtle neck wearing pretentiousness that I associated with these smug elitists. I didn’t attend the theory tutorials . I didn’t want to be confronted with left wing gobbledegook.I was taking an anti intellectual stance. But the bottom line is I was lazy. At that point, purely and simply I couldn’t be bothered to apply myself to something I didn’t really want to do. The paper got a third and dragged my degree down to a 2.2. The department head told me I could have been under consideration for a first had my written work been up to the same standard as my studio practice. I couldn’t put this on my CV however.
No one in the world of professional work is impressed with a 2.2. With a bit of luck you can scrape into a reasonable company and prove yourself on the job possibly one day crossing over to a better company if you excel, but this never occurred to me as I was sitting in the student bar getting drunk on cheap cooking lager; Charles Saatchi was going to buy my degree show and I wouldn’t have to work for anyone. Back in reality, It has made a monumental impact on my progress. I now believe it is one of the stupidest things I have ever done. Most people only normally get the chance to do one degree. One chance to get the grade that will set you apart from your peers in the job market and get you hired.
I applied to the RCA several times, (The Oxbridge of the art world) I even got an interview once in 2001. I did not get a place. Ditto the Slade, Goldsmiths and the RA schools on the not getting in front.
I since applied to the NFTS several times (The Oxbridge of the film world) I didn’t get so much as an interview.
I also couldn’t get into Watford College to study creative advertising in 2004 and again in 2007.
Objectively, if you’re sitting on the admissions panel why would you pick someone who’s had the advantage of doing a BA in one of the best colleges and on paper at least it looks like either they’ve pissed it up against the wall or they’re just not that bright, especially some-one who’s come from a fee paying school, when you could pick someone who hasn’t and who got into a less prestigious college like Nottingham Trent for example, grafted for 3 years and attained a first. That’s meritocracy for you.
Generally in life there’s no second chances. With a 2.2 the doors of the leading institutions are kinda shut to you if you don’t have the grades. Which is fair isn’t it?
Or is it?
Who is losing something if people capable of doing something are left out in the cold because they fuck up once or twice?
I don’t think it’s just the reject.
I now know I can write the essay, because I made the point of doing really got ones on my MA. To prove it to myself. Ones the theory tutor told me would have got a first at Undergrad level. Too late.
I know at the moment I am sitting in a room at SCA 2.0 each day with the cream of the crop, the very best students in their subject I think. Extremely bright people. Frankly I haven’t felt that way unanimously about a group of people in any one environment since I graduated in the year 2000 twelve years ago.
Presumably if this colleges Dean hadn’t fucked up at school and made a college where second chances are permissible, I wouldn’t have one to be in such a place.
I overheard him once on the phone to a prospective student saying:
“So you say you say you’ve been failing at school, that’s great.”
Difficult as I find this thinking to accept. I for one have accepted it.
