"Jazz Improvisation Grading"

          What are the objectives in a Jazz Improvisation course, and how can they be graded? Is it appropriate to evaluate students’ creativity, their expressiveness in soloing? Is that defendable against potential student appeals? Or is it better to restrict the grading to students’ more technical skills, their ability to re-create the required chord/scale relationships? Does that de-emphasize the importance of creativity in the students’ work and in their solos? Do students often focus most on what will get them the best grade? Should the grading process be concrete or abstract? What is the philosophy of an educator who includes grading the creative expressiveness of the student—and of the educator who does not?
            If grading music in general in any creative, credit-bearing course is any challenge at all, how much more daunting is it to grade something as personal, even as amorphous, as jazz improvisation? Yet with credit-bearing curriculum comes the responsibility for assessment and grading. Now that Improv courses for credit are common at universities and colleges—with an increasing number for credit at high schools as well—many educators are required to issue grades for their students regarding this pursuit of improvised art.
            Is it fair to model the improvisatory learning process as being one in which students cannot be expected to be creative or expressive until they have mastered a basic vocabulary? Or, in the same way we nurture infants, can we expect to nurture and therefore assess creative expression even before a basic vocabulary is evident? At the most non-art level, is attendance a factor in the grade? Its use within grading many curricula is widespread, yet in some schools or states it is actually illegal to include that factor in the grade.
            I began exploring Improvisation-grading in 1996 by direct-mailing questionnaires to nearly 200 jazz educators, followed by distributing surveys at the 1997 International Association for Jazz Education Conference. In March 1998 the IAJE Jazz Educators Journal published my article, “Grading Jazz Improvisation: On What Basis?”; and at the IAJE 2000 conference I presented a panel discussion to a room packed with educators—even at 9 a.m. in New Orleans! Clearly this is an area of intense interest.
            It is also not without its own controversy and passion. Said one respondent: “You seem to be asking us to draw a line in the sand between the development of artistic content and the development of the ability to express it. Anyone who would answer such a question in this form shouldn’t teach this music. The whole point of our existence as artists is the communication of ideas so complex and/or refined that they defy simple conversation and must be articulated in some more poignant fashion.”
            And I would agree with that last sentence, if not necessarily with the ones preceding. That said, if we were all to agree that jazz improvisation is too complex to allow for simple delineations, how then do we grade our students’ efforts in a class for academic credit—and be able to defend our grading policies against appeal?
            We—as a jazz-educating collective over recent decades, standing on the shoulders of those before us—campaigned mightly to get jazz education into the schools as an extra-curricular, co-curricular, and finally curricular option for our students. The academic system has already forced us to make a grading decision; so what are we doing with it? My position is simply that since academia demands that we grade the credited courses we teach, Improv instructors must (a) assess where that line in the sand falls between the development of artistic content and the development of the tools and/or ability to express it and (b) decide what portion of which elements we are willing to grade within that course (and find defensible doing so). Furthermore, schools typically require us to then publish that decision in our syllabi (as best we can), despite the fact that our collective goal for our students is indeed a complex, high level of musical communication that defies definition.
            The survey responses I received shed light on a range of challenges. First of all, does an emphasis on grading the more technical side of the students’ work motivate those students to spend more time on that aspect rather than balancing any exploration of creative expression? And what if the class time is actually devoted much more to the creative aspects but the grading is weighted more heavily on the technical? Does this provide the students with an ideally mixed message or a confused one?
            One result was clear. These educators’ thoughts present variety, not an edict. In fact, there is not one aspect of the survey responses on which all participants agreed—not even whether their Improv course is an “easy A” or not, not even as to whether they feel their own grading policy is defendable against a student appeal, and certainly not as to whether creativity in any form should be included within the student’s grade. But there is so much to learn from digesting the different, effective means by which any number of successful jazz educators address the art of grading Jazz Improvisation courses.
            The instructors whose responses are listed within my study represent over 700 years of combined experience and service teaching Jazz Improvisation, over 400 of those years teaching Improvisation for credit. However, since many of them have been teaching Improv for a good decade since their original responses, their input is actually even more weighted by experience.
            By focusing on the potential dichotomy and intersection between the teachable and unteachable elements of improvisation, plus the concrete and the abstract, as well as the technical and the creative, we will be better equipped to address and reconcile these factors in our own teaching and grading. To ignore these contrasting and interwoven factors would in my view be a disservice to our students and to our profession. Dialogue is preferable to avoidance.
            Let’s explore the possibilities and learn from one another!

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