NLCS J: The IGCSE Art Exam

In NLCS Jeju, the IGCSE students who have chosen Visual Arts as their Art subject, take one exam from one of the following two exam boards: Edexcel and CIE (Cambridge International Exam). To take the CIE exam, the students need to complete both the Coursework and the Exam work. To complete the Coursework, students are required to produce 8 mounts filed with their artwork showing their technical skills and thought development. Mounts are A3 sheets of paper that the students need to fill, which would be sent off to the exam boards for marking. These mounts are filled with the student’s artwork, annotations explaining their thought processes, thumbnails showing their ideas, photographs and also with the work of the artists that they have chosen. The process of filling a mount goes as the following. Firstly, the students are given a topic, for example ‘Two different worlds’ or ‘reflection’. Then they collect primary sources and secondary sources. The first mount is all about copying the objects in the sources using a range of different media. Then, students introduce number of artists in the mounts whom they have been inspired by, and start to study their artworks and techniques. The students produce artist studies, where they copy the artist’s artwork exactly, and also create an artwork in the artist’s style, using their own subject matter. During the course of introducing a few more artists, the students are able to combine the techniques they have learnt and create their own unique artwork of their own subject matter. Through this process, students are able to develop their work further, heading towards a final piece that incorporates everything they have learnt. The exam follows a similar process but instead of producing 8 mounts, they only need to produce 4 mounts for the Exam in a shorter time period.

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