National 5 Art and Design

For session 2024-25 onwards, we've reduced the length of the National 5 Art and Design question paper, and the number of marks available in the question paper, while ensuring it continues to assess the required skills, knowledge and understanding.

The updated question paper is worth a total of 40 marks, which will be scaled to 50 marks to retain its 20% weighting in the overall course assessment. The length of the exam will be reduced to 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Mandatory questions

We've reduced the number of marks available for each of the mandatory questions (question 1 and question 7) from 15 to 10.

• There will be 6 marks available for part (a) of each mandatory question: In question 1(a), learners will comment on the work of one artist, referring to three given prompts.
• In question 7(a), learners will comment on the work of one designer, referring to three given prompts.

• There will be 4 marks available for part (b) of each mandatory question: In question 1(b), learners identify and describe influences on the work of their artist from part (a).
• In question 7(b), learners identify and describe influences on the work of their designer from part (a).

Optional image questions

There is no change to the number of marks available for the optional image questions, which will continue to be worth 10 marks each. However, we’re splitting each optional image question into part (a) and part (b) to better reflect how marks are awarded for these questions.

8 marks will be available for part (a), where learners will comment on three given prompts for their chosen image, and 2 marks will be available for part (b), where learners will give their opinion on their chosen image.

Updated documents

We’ve updated the National 5 Art and Design course specification and specimen question paper to reflect these changes. The updated course specification is dated May 2024 and the updated specimen question paper is dated June 2024. Both documents are valid from session 2024-25.

View our online news article – update on National Courses for session 2024-25 onwards (13 March 2024).