Assessing students’ creativity in design education at different universities in Turkey through their admission examination types

Abstract

Creativity is a wanted and desirable human skill. When examined through the viewpoint of a fundamental exertion, much of the time, educators are asked or urged to encourage creative thinking in the classroom. However, do the educators’ definition and criteria of creativity match up with students’ creations? In this article, the question whether students who take the national entrance examination or who take the aptitude tests to study at university are more creative in the sense of Guilford’s (1950, 1967a) concepts of divergent thinking, curiosity, fluency, flexibility, elaboration and originality was elaborated. In order to achieve that aim, selections of works of the same professor’s students when he was teaching at several different universities between 2018-2020 in Turkey have been chosen and clustered as re-evaluated according to the adoptions of Guilford’s concepts of creativity. In the end, it was found out that students who take the national entrance examination are more divergent in their thinking while being less curious, fluent, flexible, elaborate and original than their peers who take the aptitude tests.