How Portfolios Are Marked and Moderated

How your art is actually marked 🎨

Component 1 is your **Personal Portfolio**, and it is worth **60%** of your whole GCSE. (Component 2, the Externally Set Assignment, is the other 40%.) Your teacher - the **centre** - marks the portfolio against a set of **mark bands**, and your work has to give evidence for all **four Assessment Objectives** (AO1 to AO4). This module is about how that marking works, so you can build a portfolio that shows the marker exactly what they are looking for.

The four Assessment Objectives 🎯

Every portfolio is marked on these four things, and they carry **equal weight**. Learn what each one asks for - the next steps ask you to spot them in real work.

Match each AO to what it rewards 🔗

Which AO is this? 🔍

A student writes notes analysing how a chosen artist used colour and composition, pinned next to printouts of that artist's paintings. Which AO does this mainly evidence?

• AO1 - developing ideas through investigation and understanding of sources
• AO3 - recording first-hand observations
• AO2 - experimenting with media and techniques
• AO4 - presenting a final response

What "holistic" means ⚖️

Your portfolio is judged as **one whole body of work** against the band descriptions - it is **not** a pile of separate scores added up piece by piece. This is called **holistic** marking. Because the four AOs carry **equal weight**, a portfolio that is brilliant at final pieces (AO4) but shows almost no research (AO1) **cannot reach the top band**. The marker is looking for real strength across all four objectives, not a spike in one.

Holistic or not? 🧠

Marking a portfolio "holistically" means the marker...

• Judges the whole body of work together against the mark bands
• Gives every individual piece its own mark and adds them up
• Marks only the single best piece in the portfolio
• Counts how many pieces the portfolio contains

Who marks, who moderates 🏫

Two different jobs sit behind your final grade. Knowing which is which stops a lot of exam-season worry.

The journey of a mark 🪜

An interactive activity.

What moderation really does ✅

Select the TWO statements that correctly describe Pearson's moderation.

• It reviews a sample of the centre's work, not every candidate
• It can move a whole centre's marks up or down if the centre was too harsh or too generous
• It re-marks every single portfolio from scratch
• It decides each student's mark before the centre has marked anything

One project, or many? 🧩

Under Edexcel, must your Personal Portfolio be one single connected project from start to finish?

• No - the pieces may be separate in focus or interconnected; there is no single-project rule
• Yes - it must be one sustained project throughout
• Yes, but only for the Fine Art title
• No - it must instead contain exactly one finished piece

Read the portfolio 🧭

An interactive activity.

The summary 📝

Component 1, the Personal Portfolio, is worth _____% of the GCSE and must evidence all _____ Assessment Objectives. The centre marks the whole body of work _____ against the mark bands, and Pearson then moderates a _____ of that work. The pieces may be separate in focus or _____; there is no single-project rule.

Your turn ✍️

An interactive activity.

The thread that reaches the top band 🌟

Here is the grade-9 secret hidden in all of this. Even though your pieces do **not** have to connect, the strongest portfolios still read like a **journey** - one idea leading into the next. That thread is what lifts work into the top band, so it is worth building even though the spec does not demand it. And remember what moderation **cannot** do: it never re-marks you in isolation or on a single piece. It checks the **centre's standard**. So the route to a high mark is always the same - evidence all **four AOs** clearly, right across the whole portfolio.