If educators concentrated on fostering students' creative skills, they wouldn't need to waste time predicting possible future creativity. I recommended having experts evaluate the creativity of actual products, like poems and artworks, as a possible alternative to divergent-thinking tests. Cramond is concerned, correctly, that judges of creative products might sometimes misjudge their creativity. Expert Opinion Is the Best Criterion While we must acknowledge that the collective opinion of experts in a field is imperfect, it is, in the end, the best criterion we have.
Expert opinion establishes the standards by which creative work is judged.
If one must have some measure of a particular kind of creativity, consensual assessment of creative products introduces the least amount of measurement error. This brings us to the aptitude-achievement distinction, a slippery slope if ever there was one. There certainly may be students who do not currently write creative poetry but who one day will do so, as Cramond suggests. Knowing what great things students might one day achieve doesn't tell us what they need now and doesn't do much to inform instruction. Part of the problem lies in defining the criteria that will be accepted as evidence of creativity.