Wednesday 10th April 2013

Apologies all for the gap since my last blog – about 3 months have elapsed. During that time we saw Christmas come and go, then hello to 2013, then my birthday, and now it’s February and I’m starting to alternately berate, persuade, nag and enthuse my final year visual arts  students about all the exciting events in March.

What fun we’ll have!

Actually we’ll have until April 10^th, although as my school has its Easter holiday from 23rd March to 7^th April, we are having the final exhibition in the week of March 18^th – 22^nd.

I know that some teachers feel that the IB have somehow altered the final dates here, saying that ‘it used to be’ April 25^th, but in fact that’s not quite true. My friend and colleague Jayson (OCC visual arts forum facilitator) has recently tried to clarify the situation with a post on the OCC

April 10^th was always the final date for teachers /coordinators to upload to IBIS internal assessment marks and predicted grades entered on IBIS.

IBIS then generated a list of samples, leading to the selected CRBs being sent off to reach the moderator by the 25th April/25th October.

Once the candidate has completed and signed the CRB, they should not work anymore on either studio or pages, since they have signed a legally binding declaration stating that the work represented in the CRB is the final version of the work.

As Jayson notes, “schools that have allowed candidates to work beyond this deadline and up to when the examiner has arrived for the interviews have, in fact, given their candidates an unfair advantage. The only changes that were permissible to a CRB were adding exhibition photographs once the exhibition had been set up”.

So April 10^th it was, and is.

Of course, even if there is no real change to the April 10^th date, there are changes to other aspects of the assessment – teachers now do the interviews, and upload recordings of these and selected studio work and pages as digital files to IB.

Can’t wait!

Cheers for now