It was the very first GIA course I took. They designed it as a stand-alone course, so you get a lot of theory in the first part. It's a terrific course for someone who doesn't know a lot about pearls. It can fill in the gaps.
They said their color grading was done by artists, but I was an artist early in my career and despite having what I consider an excellent sensitivity to color, I disagreed several times with their assessment of the color and found it baffling.
Their classification of orient is very narrow. Using the samples of baroque freshwaters from the American Pearl Company, they said that orient is the kind of oil slick iridescence seen mostly in baroques and rarely in rounds.
Rounds - yes, if it isn't perfectly spherical, they don't consider it round. In the marketplace, a pearl is round if it looks round and only has a slight variation that becomes evident upon rolling the pearl down a track. I.E., there is a small range before it is considered near-round.
Okay, negatives out of the way, I think there is so much good in the class. I took it at the Carlsbad campus in two evenings, so we got to handle some pearls the first evening and continued on the second. Also, it's kind of a sensory overkill to try to take it all in, in one day.
The akoya grading sample strands were very helpful and the materials, especially the pearl color chart, were great. You will leave the class able to classify pearls by the seven value factors. The problem is that vendors use their own standards. If everyone went with the GIA standards, then applying a quality designation to those standards (A-AAA) would be a no-brainer.
Getting to paw a bunch of pearls was definitely cool.
