Comment: Many households will have an art portfolio or three stored under beds or in the back cupboard as a record of the creative output, blood, sweat and tears of the family members who created them.
This is because every year for the past 50 years, thousands of 16-18-year-old students have prepared folio boards of highly curated creative work ready for external examination.
Folio-based assessment has been the backbone of visual arts education in New Zealand secondary schools since it was introduced in the 1970s. It has survived curriculum reforms, political cycles, and periodic calls for simplification. Now, as debates about assessment workload and system redesign intensify under the ‘back to basics’ philosophy, folio assessment is again under scrutiny. Ministry-led subjects will be assessed through one of two assessment weightings: 50 percent examination and 50 percent non-examination (coursework), or 25 percent examination and 75 percent non-examination (coursework).
For those studying visual arts this upends the way they have been externally assessed for five decades, which has been 100 percent based on a portfolio of their year’s work.
It has prompted a petition from the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Art Educators asking the Government to withdraw the proposed compulsory 25 percent exam. It has also ignited some creative social media protest work designed and created by students with the slogan ‘make art, not essays’.
Abandoning the current process for assessing visual art subjects would weaken one of the most successful, equitable, and creatively focused parts of our national qualification system.
The folio model works because it captures what art is: a process of inquiry, iteration, and visual thinking. Unlike subjects where knowledge can be tested in a two-hour exam, art learning unfolds over time; over weeks and months. Portfolios capture process, growth, experimentation and making, whereas written examinations mainly assess students’ ability to describe, analyse or recall information.
Students trial ideas, discard them, return to them, and build a visual argument. The folio has now evolved to use the traditional A1 hard cardboard but in the modern digital world also allows students to present their ideas digitally, which particularly suits students who want to create images that move such as animation, kinetic sculpture, and interactive design. Either format supports the evolution of thinking, not just the final product and is one of the few external assessment tools that genuinely rewards curiosity, risk-taking, and creative resilience.
Research over the past decade shows that students from diverse cultural backgrounds perform strongly in arts-based subjects because they can draw on their own visual traditions, identities, and ways of knowing. The reason why students continue to want to enrol in the visual arts subjects – design, photography, painting, printmaking, and sculpture – is because a folio allows students to document and express themselves and their ideas in ways that written exams simply cannot. In a country committed to biculturalism and increasingly diverse classrooms, this matters.
If we want students to develop the skills employers consistently say they need – problem-solving, originality, design thinking, and the ability to communicate visually – then we cannot pretend these can be measured through quick, standardised tests or prepared essays. Folios are demanding because the world students are entering is complex and requires the comprehension and communication of multifaceted ideas.
Folio-based assessment has built an internationally recognised pipeline of young artists, designers, photographers, and creative technologists. Tertiary institutions rely on the depth and quality of NCEA folios. Employers in design and creative industries know what a Level 3 folio represents. Removing or diluting this system would sever a link that has served employers and the creative industries well.
New Zealand has spent decades building an external visual arts assessment model that is authentic, culturally responsive, and aligned with real-world creative practice. In an era of rapid automation and shrinking opportunities for original thinking, folio-based assessment is not an indulgence but an investment in the kind of education we claim to value.
We should not abandon it. We should strengthen it.