In my days in art academy, the running joke was that

    If you were accepted into the painting faculty, you were an artist,
    If you were accepted into graphics faculty, you were color-blind,
    If you were accepted into sculpture, you were blind,
    If you were accepted into art history, you couldn't be taught to draw.

While a little cruel... (I was in the graphics), the general idea was to say that art theory, art history, and especially psychology studies around art are absolute rubbish. These people seem to get into their line of work because they failed as artists (and don't understand / can't produce art).

Likewise, in this article, the approach to defining creative thinking is... so simplistic, and the test is so irrelevant...

Just to try to give you some background as to why a student could choose one approach or the other: if a student wasn't told why they need to draw a still life, they probably didn't care much for the outcome either. Artists rarely know why they prefer one composition over the other, especially in academic studies like... still life. To an artist, the selection of objects for a still life is really arbitrary, their arrangement is arbitrary -- it makes no difference. To make an interesting still life, one would have to find something that would interest other artists in it. Like, for example, how one can show different textures of the objects of the same nominal color using color? Or... would a technique that models volume through the thickness / intensity of contours work on mostly round objects? And so on.

Later, the article is trying to assess the artist's accomplishments in ways artists would frown upon. The number of exhibitions? The sales in prestigious galleries? Yeah... as a student I spent some time working in the lab of Kadishman (the guy who draws the same sheep over and over, and then sells it for insane $$). The "master" doesn't even draw the sheep anymore. It's all Shinkar / Bezalel students who do it :D And, honestly, the sheep is one of the biggest frauds I've personally witnessed in this profession (there are, of course, things like the diamond skull from Damien Hirst, which are more expensive because of the materials used, but I didn't have a chance to behold the miracle with my own eyes).

A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity