Portfolio assessment

How your portfolio will be assessed by the Edinburgh College of Art.

Assessors understand the potential challenges of creating a portfolio so please be assured this is taken into account during assessment.

Your portfolio will be assessed by a team of Edinburgh College of Art academic staff with professional and specialist expertise and knowledge. The assessors are particularly interested in how applicants researched and developed their ideas in a visual way and how they engage with the visual arts through their imagination and creative responses to ideas, observations, processes and concepts. This is broken down into four main areas of assessment.

Each section is graded out of a maximum of five, which means that in order to construct a competitive portfolio you must exceed in each criteria. Applicants must submit five images to each of the four sections, which means they must submit twenty images in total.

Assessment Criteria

Each of the four assessment criteria are detailed in general terms here:

Visual Research and Enquiry – The level of your engagement in intelligent, structured visual enquiry and how well you communicate this.

Idea Development – Your ability to explore and develop ideas in an appropriate way, and your level of skill in the use of materials and techniques.

Selection and Resolution – How well you judge which ideas have the most appropriate potential and your ability to bring them to a level of completion appropriate to your intended outcome.

Contextual Awareness – The extent of your knowledge of the subject you have applied to and how your work relates to it.

For each programme you have applied for, a detailed subject specific brief can be found on the Edinburgh College of Art webpages. Links to the undergraduate programmes can be found here.

Your portfolio will need to include initial research and investigative work, as well as examples of how you explore ideas, plus your finished pieces of work. What form these example might take is entirely up to you, but you should ensure that it is relevant to the programme(s) you have applied for.

In order to create the strongest possible portfolio, you should ensure you fully understand the brief that is specific to the programmes you are applying for, and how to ensure your work meets the four criteria.

Overall, greater emphasis is put on evidence of your visual curiosity, idea generation and exploration and your energy, engagement and contextual awareness, than on high level technical skills and finish, as assessors understand that not all applicants may have access to the same types or level of resources to produce their final pieces.

A detailed artistic brief for each subject can be found from the relevant programme pages of degree finder.