GCSE Art - so much work!!

[Notcontent]

My year 11 DD is doing GCSE art. She knew it would be a lot of work and she really loves art, but yes, it seems to require so much more time than other subjects. She is very able and works hard in all her subjects - but she gets very good grades in her other subjects with much fewer hours of work….

When I think of the work she has done in her sketchbooks plus all the larger end of topic works etc it’s a lot of material! I actually think the expectations are too high - not in terms of the standard but the volume expected to get a good grade.

Is this your DC experience too?

My DS did GCSE art finishing in 2019 (ie the last year before Corona, so the full course). He ended up getting an 8 (the second part, worth 40%, which culminated in the exam he got a 9, but the part counting for 60% which was done earlier on was not quite as good, and got an 8 so it averaged toa high 8) He did learn and grow a tremendous amount from it, but it was a massive amount of work. And yes, one of the things that was clearly very important was not so much being able to produce good artwork, but to be able to utilise the ideas of others to take you forward, and to understand them and the impact they were having and to be able to explain that in the notations.
A lot of the problem with the first part was that he picked his theme in Year 9 (they had a three year GCSE), even though they didn't do much that was part of the assessment in Year 9, and he struggled to develop it the way he gradually came to understand it needed to be developed. It didn't have as much scope as other themes he could have picked (or at least he couldn't quite find the way to fully do it). With the second part (ie the 40%), they were given a word in January of the exam year (ie for him 2019) and he had to develop his artwork around that. Having now got a much better understanding of what they were looking for, he was able to brainstorm and pick an understanding of the word that allowed him the capacity to really develop the theme in his artwork, and so the whole portfolio on that section held together so much better. He was a bit disapointed with the 8, as he really wanted a 9, but it is hard (for me at least as his mum) not to see how the second part was not head and shoulders above the first part - mostly because while the artwork was good in the first part, it didn't have quite the same sense of developing out the theme leading to the final piece. The second part effectively told a story about his development towards the final theme, in a way the first part didn't as convincingly (partly because of the theme he chose - it was harder to know where to go in the end).
Hope this helps to explain why GCSE Art is so unbelievably time consuming. It is not just that you have to create the Art - and painting takes an incredible amount of time, but to do really well you have to structure the whole portfolio in this way and tell this story, and that in itself is immensely time consuming