Creative Industries students have increased in number and in the diversity of the creative works they submit for accreditation. These growth areas represent a microcosm of wider debates as educationalists and commercial agents assess creative works in divergent ways. In tertiary education settings teachers require students to focus on their "work in progress", emphasising the importance of the reflective learner, which exemplifies a formative function of assessment. Conversely, industry experts assess from an enterprise perspective, with a focus on the end product in terms of its commercial value, exemplifying a summative style of assessment. The dualism evident in these debates oversimplifies the meaningful assessment of creative works.

This paper forms part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project that will create a practical assessment model for disengaged youth. The paper proposes a holistic methodology to challenge the dichotomous legacy still evident in many assessment activities. Educators can use this methodology to engage students, peers and experts in explicit, "front-end" assessment (Wyatt-Smith & Bridges, 2008) to argue that holistic judgements can be replicated without adhering to preset criteria. In order to stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions about dichotomous criteria the methodology invites participants to characterise and value creative works on an X-Y axis using scatter graphs as visual stimuli. Through group negotiations for each course of study, exemplary creative works reside on the centre point of a scatter graph. Participants then plot values, which are merged and displayed in real-time, on to a holistic assessment that aims to debunk myths and question the purpose of assessments. These values and exemplary creative works, which all participants agree as relevant to the assessment situation, inform discussions about the spread of scatter graph data, using computer-aided representations to aggregate, externalise and democratise this transparent method of assessment.