Response to the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking

Response to the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking
Joshua Sampson

The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking? The Schmorance Schmest of Schmeative Schminking, more like it. I have always been an adept test taker. That’s what I tell my students, anyway. Never quite understood test anxiety or freezing up on tests. Time limits rarely bother me. Of course, I have not been a part of high-stakes testing like my students are today. They have graduation-test and EOCT stress. I just had vocabulary quizzes and final exams. Taking tests, I always knew what I knew and recognized what I did not know. If I didn’t know the answer to question fifteen, I spent no more than ten seconds accepting that fact and moved on to question sixteen. It pains me to see students who are stuck on question one, unable to move on. The TToCT was a little different for me. I found myself rechecking my answers, wondering if they were truly correct, what the instructor/grader would understand as creative. I had a hard time moving on to the next question (or example of drawing) until I felt I was completely finished with the previous one.

As the test started, I was comforted by the understanding that this was not the real test, that I was not going to be judged, and that the environment was not what it really should be. I would prefer a smaller environment, something less communal. Time was a constant factor in the quality of my results. I felt at first that I had too much time, but then as time ran out, I struggled to make sure any potential grader could understand what was going through my mind. Any deficiency I have in my artistic (ability to draw) skills, I tried to bolster with an over-exaggerated written creativeness. I spent more time thinking of the titles that I did on the drawn responses. I even tried to incorporate three drawings into the first problem. Would my grader understand this? Would I be more creative because I tried to shove more information into the limited space rather than work on quality? I understood going in to the test that the completeness of a product was important. The number of details you include do affect your score.

But that is where I see the limitation of the TToCT. Why the time limit? Do I have to be creative in just ten minutes? Does not the creative mind sometimes need time to fully express itself? I ponder this when I ask my own students to develop creative products. Is it fair to tell my students at 10:11 that a poem is due at 11:46 (the timeframe of my second block class)? Can a creative poem be written in just an hour and a half? I can surely write one, several, in fact. If I’m in the mood. This test is a snapshot of creativity and while I believe that creativity can be taught, I believe that it is initially imitation creativity. I can coach my students about the details they need to include in their poems, words they can choose and end up with a 50% student/50% teacher creative poem (actual percentages may vary). Eventually, a student may be able to create magnificent poetry, fantastic paintings, splendid musical overtures. But at first, they are all artificial. “If you add ten toes to your person, it’ll be more complete. What about toenails? Should some of them be painted? Does your person wear rings? What about curls in the hair? Eyebrows?

But ten minutes? Come on! I’m not that creative.

Scoring the TToCT? I have to admit, I was a bit put off by this. Not being qualified is one thing, but I just don’t have the experience I feel I need to judge the results I had before me. I think I know what a creative product looks like, but that is my subjective opinion. It was helpful to have our instructor going through a grocery list of pointless (not pointless, but point-less, without points) responses. I could not help but think, as many of the pointless responses mirrored my own, that it meant I, myself, was not creative. Individual responses were judged, oddly enough to me, not on completion, but on non-completion. I was taken aback by the notion that a closed drawing was worth less than an open drawing. I understand the notion that those who crave order and regularity (perhaps the less creative) want things to have a definite beginning and a definite ending. We close our drawings . . . err, I mean they close their drawings. While the creative among us are open and free with both their thinking and their pen-to-paper work. The lack of clear directions—complete directions may be a better way of saying it—aggravated me while we were grading. I constantly thought, well, if I had known it was better to combine these and not draw that kind of thing, then I would have done much better. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Those who have an innate sense of creativity are not bothered by incomplete directions. They are wild and free and make their own rules. I had a few questions while we were grading. Asked some of them aloud, but relied mostly on the help of my fellow table-mates.

I understand the test is supposed to show how far your mind can go when it is set free. If I give you a first word, “Once” will you be like everyone else and continue with “upon a time” or will you do something unheard of? “Once the soldier realized his legs were not going to work, he had to figure another way out of the ship.”

11/30/09 and 12/01/09