When it comes to grades, one size doesn't fit all.

Grades were first introduced in 18th century Europe to rank-order students. By the 1800s, Yale launched the GPA system, sowing the seeds of competition among learners while reducing the administrative burden of growing class sizes. Education hasn't looked back since.

So, what are grades exactly? Essentially, they represent the sum of all non-performance and performance-related attributes of a student. They serve as a way to score a student's ability to succeed in an academic environment, even if there's been wide debate about how well grades actually reflect learning. Today, grades are virtually inseparable from education, where teachers often assign grades to their students' performances on curricular assignments.

One of the most popular graded assessments is the infamous multiple-choice test, which consists of questions with fixed answer options, where only one option is correct. Some questions may require simple recall, while others require students to work through a logical challenge. Regardless of the task, all questions of this nature require convergent thinking - the cognitive process of solving a problem to arrive at a singular, correct answer.

Less common are assessments that require divergent thinking. When students engage in divergent thinking, they must draw from their knowledge to construct new, inventive ideas about a problem or subject. Unlike convergent thinking, divergent thinking does not lead to finding 'correct' solutions. Instead, it pushes students to explore outside the conventional boundaries of a subject and tap into their creative potential.

Here's a great video by Anne Manning explaining the difference between convergent and divergent thinking through a classroom exercise:

Remember that grades were designed as a means of making life easier for evaluators, not necessarily to help students learn. So even with methods of evaluations available, assessing creativity poses a unique challenge for teachers. After all, what is the right answer when more than one answer can be correct at the same time?

That's not to say assessments designed to check knowledge aren't valuable. Quite the contrary, since students need to gain knowledge of a subject before they can understand how to think differently about it. It is the teacher who is responsible for knowing where their students stand before expecting them to come up with creative ways to apply their knowledge.

But evaluating creative work is more involved than simply checking right or wrong answers on a test. There's a much greater degree of subjectivity, which means grading will vary across teachers. This is generally frowned upon by large institutions that push for standardization and consistency. Traditional evaluations, which are predictable and convenient, are therefore much more prevalent than creativity-based assessments that tend to get overlooked.

The practice of under-assessing creativity may explain why so many students interested in exploring their own creativity often struggle in school. The primary metric used to predict their success in this environment just doesn't tend to align well with their interests, strengths, or innate abilities.

Thankfully there are many programs in design and art schools leading the way. We also tend to see much more focus on innovation today in management, leadership and entrepreneurship educational programs around the world, and research that crosses domains continues in this area at top institutions like Harvard.

Yet there is still so much to do to cultivate creativity and build it into the metrics of assessing what constitutes "academic achievement", particularly within the often rigid and highly-standardized public education system.

As an educator and artist, I'm hopeful that in these times of transition, we will see changes coming that challenge old paradigms so all learners can be supported in today's classrooms.

Perhaps when it comes to grades, one size doesn't fit all. Maybe grading just needs a bit of creativity itself.