Department Guidelines

Assessment Guidelines

It is your responsibility to make sure your work has been received by your art teacher when an assessment is due. You must ensure your teacher has recorded your submission as being handed in.
All art staff will assess your work together. There will be careful interclass comparability and if necessary, judgements will be checked with an external expert.
You will be given your results as soon as the entire year group has been assessed. You will be given the opportunity and appropriate information to check the validity of the decisions that the assessor has made.
By the end of the year you will need to sign acceptance of your grades. You will get a full set of results for senior courses when you receive your results in January. In some cases your teacher will need to keep your work as a sample for the moderation/verification process. This is an NZQA requirement.
Lost work / lateness / illness and extensions: Students who have a valid reason for being unable to complete an assessment on time may be granted an extension. The application for the extension must be granted before the due date of the assignment by the HOD and deans unless there are exceptional circumstances. See your teacher as soon as possible if you think you require an extension. If you are sick on the day of the assessment deadline you need to let the HOD know or get someone else to hand in for you.
Work handed in late with no explanation will not be accepted or assessed.
Your progress and achievement will be assessed during each unit. Formative assessment dates will be specifically identified on the calendar. These are an indication of the level at which you are working and guidelines are given for improvement. You are then given the opportunity to rework this in your own time. . Completed assessments must be handed in by by the time specified by your teacher on the day specified for the final summative deadline. You will be reminded about these deadlines throughout the year.
Failure to hand work without first having a conversation with your teacher about why it is being handed in late will usually result in a 'Not Achieved' grade.

Homework Expectations

The demands of NCEA are such that you must be prepared to work in your own time on a regular basis. Your homework must include:

Researching relevant artist's work and images if required Preparing and presenting visual research.
Completing work, and improving on your technique.
When no homework is directly set, it is expected that you are spending time on practical work.

Authenticity

Authenticity is fundamental to an artist's integrity and is taken very seriously by the Visual Arts Department.
All work completed and handed in for assessment must be your own work.
Submitting work made by AI without disclosure is a firm breach of these authenticity guidelines (see below).
It is not appropriate for students to ask others to complete the work (including your parents, or an out of school tutor).
Students found to be submitting work that has been completed by someone else will receive an immediate 0 or Not Achieved, and in extreme circumstances may not be able to complete their course. The Dean and Head of Department may need to follow-up with further consequences.
Most of the work you submit will be completed during class time. It is appropriate and anticipated that you will complete some work at home but you may be asked by your teacher to help authenticate work which does not look like your previous work.
To ensure that your teacher can authenticate your work it is in your best interest to bring it in to school for feedback frequently.
Keeping a consistent and up to date workbook (physically and/or digitally) is the best way to ensure authenticity, as it helps support where your ideas and skills development came from if there is any doubt.
'Appropriation' and 'found imagery' can be legitimate artistic tools and are not necessarily breaches of our authenticity guidelines but this use must be disclosed (see below).
When using Photoshop please ensure you save all the layers you have been working with as a PSD file. Your teacher may request to see your layers to confirm authenticity. Using AI within Photoshop to create elements (without disclosing this) is a breach of authenticity.
Senior students should expect to sign an authenticity statement for NCEA Achievement Standards.

Appropriation & Found Imagery

'Appropriation' in art is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation to create a new work.
'Found' or 'source' imagery is the use of pre-existing images used as raw material for new work you are creating. Collage is a good example of this.
When considering appropriation and the use of found imagery in your creative process or thematic concerns this should be very obvious and usually stated. It will be ok in some instances or with some themes but not with others.
In most cases (particularly in Design) found imagery must be considerably 'transformed' in your creative process (a single Photoshop filter is not enough!).
Appropriation is uncommon except with Pop or Conceptual Art and would only be used at school if you are taking this specific approach related to your themes. Scholarship pages would be a great place to dig into this fascinating and controvertial area of art.
A good rule of thumb is that no more than about 30% of a composition should be source imagery and if it is more than that is it because you spent lots of time combining many things from many places, based on established practice and thematic concerns appropriate to the use of found imagery.
For NCEA external folios you are required to provide a list of links declaring where you sourced any found imagery.
If in doubt, talk with your teacher!
Again, if you use found imagery without disclosure it will be seen as a breach of authenticity guidelines.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is only a tool. YOU are the artist!
Like talking with a 'smart but sometimes confused' friend, collaborating with AI can be a great way to develop ideas, build up a moodboard, and test your thinking, but it should never replace your critical thinking, creativity, or decision-making.
AI may be helpful for 'boring' tasks but you should be very careful not to overuse it for the creative 'fun' parts of creating art.
AI tools can be helpful with drawing, painting, printmaking or illustration for helping you in developing a composition, but please be transparent about this and aim to only use it for part of the process (i.e. you may develop a rough idea of a composition by using prompts in an image generator but you should then clarify and adapt that based on your own thinking and reflection).
On Lightroom and Photoshop AI is fantastic for removing elements in a composition, creating complex layer masks quickly, and for extending a background for example. These uses of AI can be ok but if you aren't sure ask your teacher.
If you ever lie to your teacher about using AI they will have to assume you are breaching our authenticity guidelines (see above). Trust is number one!
Top Tip: Never use AI for the very start or very end of a process, only sometimes during the process.
Please remember that there are significant ethical issues with the development and use of AI. These learning language models have been trained on millions of artist's work without their consent or renumeration for the benefit of large corporations. When you put your own work into AI you are adding to this great robbery of the creative and intellectual property of humankind. 'Artists Against AI' is a growing movement for good reason.

Attendance

Your teacher will be monitoring the progress of your art work in class. Therefore it is important that you attend class regularly. If your teacher is concerned about your attendance or limited evidence of work, your parents and/or guardian will be contacted and invited to come in to make a plan to assist you with time management and work completion. You may be expected to catch up work through after school or lunchtime workshops.
It is an expectation of the course that you are fully prepared for each lesson with the correct equipment. It is your responsibility to look after your materials and equipment. In case of absence, it is your responsibility to catch up on work missed.

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