NADA Curated: Reduction to Satire (Reductio ad Satura)

Shannon Wright’s series Rubric began as a tongue-in-cheek response to academia’s focus on “measurable learning outcomes.” For Wright, sculpture, as a category, struck her as essentially immune to quantitative assessment. When the sculpture called Effort assigns itself an A-plus for effort, it satirically alludes to current dialogues surrounding artificial intelligence. “As an educator, I am a relatively late adopter of detailed grading rubrics­. I cringed when I first guiltily acknowledged that rubrics make my life simpler even as they replace nuance and complexity with simplistic formulas,” notes Wright.