IB Diploma · session May 2027

Visual Arts

Guide first assessed May 2027.

Task 1

The theory The syllabus content of this unit, explained in order. Read → Worked examples Answers written the way a scheme rewards, with the commentary that explains the marks. Read → Assessment guide What the coursework asks for, task by task. Read → Criteria checklist The assessment criteria, turned into a list you can tick off. Read →

The course in one page

The course in one page. Standard and higher level, for the guide first assessed May 2027.

Read this first

November 2026 is the last sitting of the 2016 guide. May 2027 is the first sitting of this one. You are in the first cohort.

Two consequences:

Every resource written before 2025 describes a different course. If what you are reading mentions a comparative study, a process portfolio and an exhibition with a curatorial rationale, it is the old guide. The new course has three tasks with different names and different requirements.
There are no exemplars from previous sessions. The IB's own teacher support material is the only authentic guidance, and your teacher's reading of it matters more than usual.

What the course is

The new guide reorganises Visual Arts around art-making as inquiry. That phrase is not decoration — it describes the assessment logic. You are not marked on producing accomplished objects and then explaining them afterwards. You are marked on using art-making as a way of investigating something, and on showing that investigation happening.

The practical consequence: a beautiful final piece with no visible inquiry behind it scores less than a less polished piece that demonstrably resolved a question the student was genuinely working on.

The three tasks

	Task	SL	HL
1	Art-making inquiries portfolio — the record of your investigation: experiments, failures, research, technical development, reflection	✓	✓
2	Connections study (SL) / Artist project (HL) — situating your practice in relation to other artists, contexts and audiences	connections study	artist project
3	Resolved artworks — the finished pieces, presented as a coherent body of work	✓	✓

Higher level requires more in each: more resolved works, deeper contextual investigation, and the artist project in place of the connections study.

There is no written examination

Visual Arts is entirely internally and externally assessed coursework. There is no Paper 1, no Paper 2, no exam session for this subject. Educerie therefore does not mock it — there is nothing to mock.

What Educerie can do, and what this material does, is help you understand what the criteria actually reward, and give you a way to check your portfolio against them while there is still time to change it.

What the assessment actually rewards

Evidence of process, including failure. A portfolio showing only successful experiments is a weaker portfolio. Documented failure — an approach tried, evaluated, and abandoned for stated reasons — is direct evidence of inquiry, which is the thing being assessed.

Specific, cited influences. "Inspired by surrealism" is not an influence. "I took the compressed picture plane from a specific painter's work and tested it against my own subject, finding it flattened the figures more than I wanted" is. Name works, not movements.

Technical development shown over time. Show the same technique early and late. Improvement you can see is worth more than improvement you assert.

Reflection that changes something. Reflection is only evidence if a decision follows from it. "This did not work" is a note. "This did not work because the ground was too absorbent, so I primed the next three" is reflection.

Coherence across the body of work. The resolved artworks should read as connected — by question, method or material — not as a collection of unrelated pieces.

The most common ways students lose marks

Treating the portfolio as a scrapbook assembled at the end rather than a record kept throughout. Assessors can tell, because retrospective reflection has no failures in it.
Naming movements instead of works.
Describing what was done without saying why, or what was learned.
Presenting only successes.
Resolved works with no visible relationship to the portfolio's inquiry.
Leaving documentation until the final term, by which time the evidence no longer exists.
Using another artist's imagery without transformation or acknowledgement.

Educerie · written from the published IB Diploma Programme structure for Visual Arts, first assessment 2027. Original text. This subject is assessed entirely by coursework; there is no written examination. Last reviewed 5 September 2026.