Done and Dusted – for the last time ever.

That’s it then. Our examiner arrived on Thursday, spent about nine hours quietly working his way through this year’s visual arts cohort, and now almost all the exhibitions have come down and the students have taken a lot of their artwork home. (And we wait until July to see if the actual grades are within spitting distance of the predicted grades).

Now it’s the Easter break, (including a couple more school visits and interviewing a few more students), then back to teaching for the 4^th Quarter, and a few more visits – to the last few schools and interviews with the last few students.

To be honest, examiner numbers are/were increasing at an almost unsustainable rate, given the small and over worked administrative base in Cardiff and The Hague. In 2010 there were slightly more than 600 examiners (which was a 20% increase on the year before); last May there were about 650 visual arts examiners, most of whom visited schools (some moderate Internal Assessment and do not necessarily also visit schools), assessing the work of getting on for 12,000 candidates, more than half taking option A at Higher Level.

Not all schools offer visual art, of course – although for a non-compulsory course it does well, with almost 70% of all schools offering visual arts last year.

So next year I’ll only be interviewing my own students.

OK, so perhaps it’s not quite as exciting for them as some unknown person coming from outside, but hey – we’ve been through that. They will have the benefit of me knowing them (and of course the corollary, them knowing me), and I don’t think that any of this group will be particularly nervous.

And we have a year to decide whether to go audio or video. The OCC continues to provide lots of opinions and some concerns both about various e-CRB issues and how to document the interview.