A lecturer wants to grade me based on 'creativity' in a task, how do I succeed?
tl;dr: your lecturer is right in principle. Commit time and effort to your project and try to be creative.
In higher education, students are expected to develop the skills which enable them to apply a number of techniques, compare the results, evaluate their effectiveness, synthesise new methods, or even suggest new approaches to a problem. Your lecturer is right to expect students to be creative.
In the last decades academia is under an increasing pressure of corporate managerial culture: education is considered as service and students are treated as customers. This creates a new kind of relations. Some students expect to acquire complex skills without spending sufficient time practising them (without feeling overworked) and expect first-class grades without committing themselves to the work required. Some students, supported and encouraged by academic managers, require more strict and deterministic rules to be set for academic assessments, such as precise specification of assessments, past papers to be provided with model solutions, and new assessments to be very predictable. Under this pressure, academics are forced to remove creative elements from their assessments and ultimately from their courses. As the result, many students don't develop the creative, teamwork and communication skills which are important for employers.
Even if your lecturer was not very efficient in communicating expectations, they are right in principle: they actually want you to use education as the opportunity to develop right skills. You want security and a good mark. Your think as a consumer; your lecturer thinks as an educator.
So my suggestion is: trust your lecturer; commit time to the project; try to be creative as much as possible. For this, learn at least 3 different methods to solve the problem, reproduce them, and try to create one more from scratch. Compare the results and present results in an engaging and visual way. Plan at least 5 hours of work for 1 minute of final presentation or 1 page of final report.
My first impression of what you describe is that the instructor tries to achieve two things:
- he wants to avoid teaching you to write long reports, which could be a good thing; there are many fields where writing long reports should not be a priority.
- he is gradually allowing more freedom as students progress through the curriculum.
The latter is what I do as well: for first year bachelor students I give very short strucutured exercises, and last year master students get an exercise to do some analysis of your choice on a topic you like with data you found using one or more of the methods we discussed in class as appropriate. I do of course reward creativity in the latter exercise. This is (at least for me) the goal of a university education: at the end they should be able to do tasks like these on their own. This does mean that each time you make a step in that direction, you will push students outside their comfort zone, but that is the point: you cannot grow if you stay in your comfort zone. This also means that if you give students more freedom, the exercise by necessity become less structured and the grading less predictable.
So one possible solution to your problem is a change of perspective: Don't focus on the grade, but instead view this as an opportunity to grow. You might fail, but failure is also very much a part of learning. Moreover, failure in a project does not necessarily mean failure of that class. One of the courses I learned most about as a student was one where I had a cool idea, but I could not get it to work. Eventually, I had to hand in what I got. I got points for the idea but also lost points for the fact that it was not done, which I though was fair enough. More importantly, I use the lessons I learned from getting stuck in that course till this day.
I am surprised, or, better said, appalled, by the answers given so far. It looks like the general consensus is that the instructor is right and you should just shut up and comply. I strongly disagree. If this is a technical course, the instructor should only grade technical accomplishment. Extra credit for "creativity" or "humor" are OK, but those are subjective and therefore should not be used when evaluating a technical skill.
Sadly, I think you are in a difficult situation: if the instructor thinks it's OK to put those requirements on a technical project, my guess is he is not the type of person you can hope to convince by rational arguments. I would go to someone above him and file a complaint.