At the present moment, students in Australian film schools have a qualitative form of assessment. By all accounts, this assessment process works well and graduate creative works are accepted as publications by national and international festivals. There is, however, no published research to indicate that these evaluations are consistent and Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) does not recognize creative works as publications data which has many negative consequences. To deal with this problem, in 2005, members of ASPERA devised a system of assessing screen productions using anintegrated network of State and National Peer ReviewCommittees. This system has never been tested before.

Our project will statistically test the operation of ASPERA’s Peer Review assessment system using screen productions completed by students attending 19 Australian film schools. The aim is to accumulate a body of evidence that will demonstrate, in quantitative and qualitative terms, that evaluation of creative works is as consistent as evaluation conducted in traditional discipline areas.

The two conferences associated with this project will examine the nature of image-based scholarship: What does it mean to write with images? What kind of creative logic is at play when each image may well contain thousands of “words”. What makes this multidimensional, diagetic and lifelike communication so efficient and so powerful? How do we evaluate this process and arrange academic regulations to moderate the evaluation process?