Educerie · IB Diploma · Visual Arts
Task 1 — Assessment guide
Why there is no practice paper for this subject. Visual Arts is assessed entirely by coursework. There is no written examination in any session, so there is nothing for Educerie to mock. In place of a topic test, this guide and the accompanying checklist give you a way to assess your own portfolio against what the task rewards — while there is still time to change it.
What is being assessed
Task 1 assesses art-making as inquiry: not the quality of the objects alone, but the visible quality of the investigation that produced them. In practice assessors are asking four questions of your portfolio.
1Is there a genuine inquiry, and does it develop?
They are looking for a question rather than a topic, and for evidence that the question changed in response to what you made. An inquiry stated on page one and repeated unchanged on page forty suggests the making did not inform the thinking.
Strong evidence: a dated entry where the inquiry is explicitly revised, with the making that caused the revision on the facing page.
2Is the investigation sustained, and does it include failure?
Sustained means continuous over time, not concentrated. Dated entries spread across the course are worth more than the same quantity produced in a final burst, because they demonstrate practice rather than compliance.
The failure test: if every experiment in your portfolio succeeded, either you took no risks or you edited the failures out. Both weaken the evidence.
3Are influences specific, and did you learn something from them?
Named works, not movements. A quality isolated, tested against your own subject, and the result reported — including when it did not transfer.
4Does reflection lead to decisions?
Reflection is evidence only if something follows from it. Assessors read for the chain: observation → interpretation → decision → the next piece of making.
How to audit your own portfolio
Do this once a term, not once at the end.
Print or lay out everything in date order. Gaps become visible immediately, and a gap of six weeks is a gap in the evidence.
Count the failures. If fewer than a quarter of your documented experiments were unsuccessful, you are either editing or not testing anything difficult.
Follow one thread end to end. Pick a technique and trace it: first attempt, problems, changes, current state. If you cannot follow it from the portfolio alone, an assessor cannot either.
Read your captions with the images covered. Do they say what you were trying to find out? If they only list materials, they are labels, not documentation.
Check the link to the resolved works. For each resolved artwork, can you point to the portfolio pages it came from? If not, write the connecting entry now, while you remember.
Common portfolio problems and their fixes
| Problem | Fix |
|---|---|
| Inquiry is a topic | Rewrite as a question with a variable you can change and an outcome you could be wrong about |
| Everything succeeded | Document the next three experiments before you know the outcome |
| Influences are movements | Replace each with one named work and one quality taken from it |
| Reflection is evaluative ("I like this") | Rewrite so each entry ends with a decision |
| Portfolio is undated | Date from now; do not backdate — assessors can tell, and it is academic misconduct |
| Six-week gap | You cannot recover it. Increase density from now and note honestly what the gap was |
| No connection to resolved works | Write one linking entry per resolved piece, citing portfolio pages |
The timeline that actually works
Fifteen minutes at the end of every studio session. Photograph the state of the work, write two or three sentences saying what you were testing and what happened, date it.
That is the whole method. Students who do this have a portfolio; students who intend to write it up later have a reconstruction, and reconstructions have no failures in them because nobody remembers their failures accurately.
Educerie · written from the published IB Diploma Programme structure for Visual Arts, Task 1, first assessment 2027. Original text. This subject has no written examination. Last reviewed 5 September 2026.