The NATA drawing paper is not an art exam

A student comes out of the drawing paper sure that the girl at the next desk has topped it. Confident lines, real shading, roof tiles rendered one by one. Then the results come and that sheet has scored below the plain one next to it. None of it makes sense until somebody explains what the examiner was handing eighty marks out for.

Part A asks whether you can hold a three dimensional idea steady in your head, turn it around, and get it onto the sheet so a stranger can rebuild it from your lines. Drawing is only the medium the Council of Architecture tests that through, and most preparation confuses the medium with the ability underneath.

Eighty marks, ninety minutes, about three questions

NATA runs to 200 marks across two parts. Part A is the drawing paper: 80 marks, offline, about three questions in ninety minutes. Part B is aptitude on a computer, 120 marks, around fifty questions. No negative marking anywhere in either part.

The drawing paper carries forty per cent of the total. The part nobody talks about carries sixty. And three questions in ninety minutes works out at thirty minutes a sheet, which has to cover reading the brief and settling the composition before the pencil moves.

Thirty minutes is enough to construct something carefully. Nowhere near enough to render it lovingly as well.

The four things a marker is looking for

The marking comes down to four judgements about your sheet.

• Composition and proportion. Whether the sheet works as a whole, with a foreground, a middle distance and a background, and whether objects stand in a believable size relationship. A door the height of a seated man ends the argument early.
• Perspective and three dimensional construction. Whether there is a horizon line and whether the geometry obeys it. Two objects in one scene should send their receding edges to the same vanishing point. When they do not, the marker can see each was drawn from its own viewpoint.
• Line quality and presentation. Decisive lines rather than four tentative ones stacked together, construction lines kept light, a sheet not smudged grey by a dragging hand.
• Response to the stated idea. The brief names a subject, usually a viewpoint, often a time of day or a light source, sometimes a mood. Each clause is a place where the marker gives or withholds marks.

The fourth costs candidates the most. "Draw a tea stall on a wet evening as seen from across the road" is four instructions, and a sheet that obeys three of them loses marks in a category no amount of shading reaches. Underline the clauses. Check them off before you hand the sheet in.

The habits four years of art class leave behind

Students who have drawn for pleasure since Class 6 arrive with skills built for another task. They render. Then they spend what is left of the ninety minutes finishing one beloved object while a third of the sheet stays empty, and they draw the building as they know it looks rather than as it looks from the viewpoint the brief named, which is the commonest way a perspective falls apart. A student who has never drawn seriously and spends six weeks on construction can outscore them.

Part B and the clock that arrived in 2025

Part B carries more marks than the drawing and gets a fraction of the attention. Around fifty questions for 120 marks: visual and spatial reasoning, the built environment, some mathematics, some awareness of materials.

In 2025 the Council put a timer on each question. Instead of one pool of minutes to spend as you like, you get roughly 108 seconds, and then the screen moves on without you. You cannot bank the ninety seconds you saved on something you knew instantly and spend them on the one that needs working out.

A candidate sitting mocks where they can drift back and forth across the section is practising a paper that no longer exists. Put a timer on every question at home. Otherwise the practice teaches you to deliberate, and deliberation is exactly what the paper stopped paying for.

With no negative marking anywhere in NATA a blank is a straight loss, and we work that arithmetic through in full here. On a paper that takes the decision away at 108 seconds, the habit to build is answering with whatever you have at ninety.

What six weeks buys, and what it does not

Two things move fast enough to be worth a timetable.

Perspective construction. One point and two point setups, the horizon line at the stated eye level, circles turning into ellipses as they rotate away, shadows cast from a light source you decided on and stuck to. This is geometry with a pencil. A teacher can cover it in a fortnight and you can drill it over another two.

Proportion. Learn a few real dimensions and everything on the sheet sits at the right size. A doorway is about 2.1 metres. A chair seat is about 450 millimetres off the floor. A standing adult runs to roughly seven and a half head heights. Draw a figure into every sheet, even where the brief did not ask for people, and use it as your ruler.

Line confidence, drawing speed and the stock of remembered shapes come out of years of volume, and six weeks buys none of them. The spatial reasoning underneath moves more slowly still, which is why a cognitive profile reports it as a band rather than a number to raise before the exam.

The honest allocation six weeks out, then. Most of the drawing time on construction and proportion, timed Part B practice every other day, nothing on rendering. Giving that up feels wrong, because it is the part that looks like progress.

Three attempts, and what that does to the first one

NATA is offered up to three times in a year and the best of your scores is the one that counts. Most candidates still treat the first sitting as the real exam and the second as the safety net, which has it the wrong way round.

The first attempt is the cheapest accurate diagnostic available. No mock at home reproduces the room, an unfamiliar brief, ninety minutes that pass faster than at your desk, or a clock that will not wait. Sit it early, and read the result as evidence about where the marks went rather than a verdict on whether you can draw.

The honest position

If you can build a two point perspective on a blank sheet without stopping to think, if your figures sit at the right height against your doorways, and if your timed Part B practice is landing, you do not need to buy anything from us or from anyone else. Draw one sheet a day against a real brief and a real clock, and turn up.

The candidates worth measuring are the ones whose drawing scores have stopped moving and who cannot say which of the four criteria is costing them. Eighty marks reported as one number tells you nothing about whether the loss came from proportion, from a perspective that does not hold, or from a brief read too fast. Those are separate problems with separate fixes. LENS for NATA returns them as separate numbers, with spatial construction kept apart from presentation, because adding the two helps nobody.