Something that is discouraging about going to art school is the concept of getting graded on your creativity and innovation. This is something that I have just started to not take personally this year, yes marks are important to your school success but it isn’t always needed for validating the work you do. If you make work that pushed you and is something you are really proud of and learned something through the process of it the mark shouldn’t matter.
This can be a hard concept for people to understand and accept (myself included) especially as artists, we crave validation, and most never see their body of work as good. The point of art school is to learn and develop yourself as an artist, gruelling critique’s and bad marks are all part of the process. In the end, it doesn’t make you a bad artist, rather it can help push you to be even better.