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Personal Project: Developing Product Success Criteria

Personal Project information and support for teachers and students

Creating Success Criteria

Writing success criteria (product specifications) for product goals

Success criteria are like a builder’s manual for a product. These set of specifications should allow others to recreate your product and tackle all aspects of the product. When creating products, you always have to have a reason for why you are choosing one thing over another.

Students also use success criteria when assessing whether or not your product was successful, so they need to be specific and detailed. There are multiple effective ways to do this, but the main idea is that success criteria should be meaningful and relevant to your goal. Students need to ensure they have thought through all aspects of their intended product goal.

Success criteria require thought and research to develop. Sometimes students will mistakenly focus on success criteria that are "easy" to measure but that are not meaningful. The size and page number of a book, for example, are very easy to measure but may not be relevant to the quality of a product if they were selected arbitrarily.

Success criteria should be specific, rigorous, realistic, testable and based on research (either primary or secondary). Note that having more success criteria is not necessarily better.