The difficulties of assessing design students' creativity: A critical review on various approaches for design education

Design education bodies have been calling for new assessment approaches in higher education. However, there has been little research hitherto conducted in assessing designers' creative thinking skills as well as their performances. It is difficult to develop a generic assessment tool to assess design students' problem-solving skills, creative outcomes and end products due to the diverse design domains, content specifics and the subjectivity of aesthetic judgment. This paper aims to further the discussions on seeking appropriate assessment tools for assessing designers' creativity form. Although this paper is not able to suggest a perfect assessment tool for higher design education, advantages of using criterion-referenced assessment (CRA) have been explored to facilitate design students' creativity development.