Example #1: Criterion C

Few candidates go beyond being descriptive and provide a detailed account including reasons or causes for why the project had an impact on them, so why it mattered. 

Example

Level: 3

The only part of section C of the report where there is something including an impact completing the project has had on the student or their learning, is in the first two short paragraphs. This is focused on insights made by the student from running a self-directed project for the first time, such as learning to manage time and taking responsibility for their own work. However, this is quite vague and only briefly outlined, just beyond stated. The rest of section C is irrelevant to strand i and is not addressing any impact on the student or their learning.

Candidates are often successful in going back to their success criteria to review their completed product. Most candidates also manage to generate a final, complete product. To reach the higher levels of Cii, candidates need to evaluate (making an appraisal by weighing strengths and limitations) their product by systematically going through each of their stated success criteria. Simply describing their product, even if doing so in alignment with the aspects of the success criteria, will not qualify as an evaluation according to the command term definition. 

Another commonly observed fault in Cii is to present results from a survey without further analysis of that data, which will not account for as an evaluation either. Candidates should be guided to not just present results from a survey or the views of others. If candidates choose to survey others for opinions on the quality of their product, at a minimum the candidate has to interpret that data to make an appraisal of the product’s quality, by weighing up strengths and limitations. 

Example

Level: 3 

There is not an evaluation of the product, using the success criteria presented earlier in the report, which means that the work is below a level 5. There is not a clear statement whether the product was achieved, but there are mentions about not reaching all the goals, referring to not including as many recipes as they wished and not liking the way the product looked. So, there is a mention of the product and fragments about to what limit it was achieved. At the end there is evidence of the product, partially providing evidence of whether it was achieved. Since there is not a clear statement in the report whether the product was achieved, only indications, the lower level of the 3–4 band was awarded.