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The IB has redesigned the Diploma Programme Visual Arts course. Students who began the DP in August or September 2025 follow the new course, with first assessment in May 2027. If you are in your first or second year of IB Visual Arts now, this is your course.

At its heart is art-making as inquiry. Your classroom works like a contemporary art studio, and you learn by making: asking questions, experimenting, researching, reflecting and resolving. The creative process is generative, multiple and non-linear, so there is no single "right" route through it, only your own.

The aim of the course

The new course aims to help you think and work like an artist. Over two years, you will:

• Explore the diversity of art across time, cultures and contexts
• Grow as an imaginative, skilled creator and collaborator who expresses ideas with competence
• Reflect critically on how art is made and experienced
• Discover how making art builds knowledge, deepens understanding and changes how you see the world
• Use curiosity, creativity and dialogue to engage with yourself, others and the world
• Draw on art-making for your own wellbeing and that of your community, and enjoy a lifelong engagement with the arts

Along the way, you develop a personal visual language and learn to communicate your artistic intentions to different audiences.

Seven assessment objectives sit inside your creative process and run through all three assessment tasks. Think of them as flexible processes rather than steps to complete in order:

The new course makes a clear distinction between SL and HL. You still complete three assessment tasks, but the second and third tasks are different at each level. Two tasks are externally assessed by IB examiners. The third is internally assessed by your teacher and moderated by the IB.

Part 1: Art-making Inquiries Portfolio

SL and HL | External assessment | SL 40%, HL 30% of your grade

Your portfolio is curated evidence of your art-making as inquiry. You select and organize visual evidence of your investigations, experiments, discoveries and creations, supported by critical reflection. It shows how you developed and refined your visual language through one or more lines of inquiry, using a variety of art-making forms and creative strategies.

Part 2 (SL): Connections Study

SL only | External assessment | 20% of your grade

The Connections Study replaces the old Comparative Study, and it begins with your own work. You choose one of the five resolved artworks you submit for your internal assessment and situate it in context. You explore the connections between your artwork and your own context(s), and between your artwork and at least two artworks by different artists. Your connections must be informed by research, and you must show an understanding of the cultural significance of the other artists' works.

Part 2 (HL): Artist Project

HL only | External assessment | 30% of your grade

The Artist Project is completely new. It is a stand-alone project of your choice in which you ideate, create and realize an artwork in a context you choose, for a real audience. Your project is informed by investigation of context, by connections with at least two artworks by different artists, and by dialogues with others. It is the closest the course comes to working as a professional artist, from proposal to public outcome.

What you submit (three files): one PDF of up to 12 screens and 2,500 words in total (project proposal: up to 3 screens, 500 words; connections: up to 4 screens, 1,000 words; dialogues: up to 2 screens, 500 words; project evaluation: up to 2 screens, 300 words; ideas for further development: 1 screen, 200 words), one video of up to 3 minutes showing your artwork realized in its chosen context, and one separate text file listing your sources.

How we help: the Artist Project rewards planning and project management. We help you shape a proposal that is both ambitious and realistic, choose a meaningful context and audience, connect with relevant artists, prepare for and record your dialogues, plan and film your video, and write an honest, forward-looking evaluation, all within the strict word limits for each section.

Part 3 (SL): Resolved Artworks

SL only | Internal assessment, moderated by the IB | 40% of your grade

This is the culmination of your artistic process: a coherent body of five resolved artworks that connect with each other and show your best achievements. Your teacher, and then the IB moderator, look for the synthesis of concept and form, and for your competence in skills and media. You also write a rationale explaining your artistic intentions and the choices that shaped your body of work.

What you submit: five image or video files of your artworks (videos up to 3 minutes each), each with a title, medium and size, plus up to two supporting images per artwork. One PDF of up to 2 screens for your rationale, with a maximum of 700 words.

Part 3 (HL): Selected Resolved Artworks

HL only | Internal assessment, moderated by the IB | 40% of your grade

At HL, you select five resolved artworks from at least eight of your works. Together, they must form a coherent body of work. As well as synthesis of concept and form, skills and media, HL students situate each selected artwork in a wider art context and in relation to their own practice.

What you submit: five image or video files of your artworks (videos up to 3 minutes each), each with a title, medium and size, plus up to two supporting images per artwork. One PDF of up to 8 screens containing a rationale (up to 2 screens, 700 words), a selection chart (one screen), and artwork texts (up to 5 screens, around 200 words per artwork, 1,000 words maximum in total).

What has changed from the previous course?

• The Comparative Study is gone. SL students now complete the Connections Study, and HL students the Artist Project.
• The Process Portfolio has become the Art-making Inquiries Portfolio, with up to 15 screens at both levels.
• The Exhibition is now Resolved Artworks (SL) or Selected Resolved Artworks (HL). Everyone submits five artworks, instead of 4 to 7 (SL) or 8 to 11 (HL).
• The curatorial rationale is now a rationale of up to 700 words at both levels. HL students also present a selection chart and write artwork texts.
• SL and HL are now clearly different, with their own tasks and weightings.