This standard provided clear opportunities for students to attain grades at achieved, merit and excellence, using the describe, explain and discuss model. The resource sheet enabled candidates to focus on identifying and evaluating the application the heuristics.

Overall, candidates' performance in 2021 improved, with a high percentage of candidates attempting all parts of the task. A large number of candidates presented reports showing considerable insight and passion.

A shorthand list of the heuristics is provided as an aide-memoire for candidates, who are meant to understand the implications of these. Candidates who had not prepared adequately for the assessment struggled to use the literal meaning of the listed heuristics to try and answer the questions.

Most candidates described the role of their chosen interface and were able to identify and describe four heuristics.

Some candidates showed a weak or partial understanding of a number of heuristics (user control and freedom, flexibility and efficiency of use, and the two error-based heuristics, error prevention and help users recognise, diagnose and recover from errors.) which meant they were limited their ability to demonstrate evidence at a higher grade.

Those candidates who compared their chosen interface to a second video that was provided generally did better in the comparison as they could use screenshots to illustrate their point. 

Some candidates who attempted part (c) did not make an evaluation. A response that was merely adding further evidence of the type already supplied in the description tasks in parts (a) and (b) meant that the response was not at merit or excellence level. Evaluation, however, continues to be poorly understood by some candidates.  Some candidates simply repeated the answers to previous questions using different words or provided a score (e.g. ‘I would give Visibility of System Status a 9/10’). This is not sufficient as it needed to be justified with examples.

In part (d), the task requiring a discussion of improvements, some candidates failed to mention the heuristics that they were talking about. Some candidates spoke about heuristics without supporting evidence, which made it difficult to determine their level of understanding.

Check out the 91886 Assessment Report 2021 if you want some more specifics about what was done to meet each level of achievement.