Personal Project: Product Success Criteria

Defining the Product with Success Criteria

The success criteria, developed by the student, measure the degree of excellence to which the product aspires or the terms under which the product can be judged to have been successful.

• The success criteria must be testable, measurable and observable (e.g. SMART).
• The success criteria must evaluate the product.
• The success criteria must evaluate the impact on the student or the community.

Below are general ideas of specific product features that may help students establish success criteria to evaluate the quality of their products. Success criteria should be meaningful and based on research ideally. They should not be arbitrarily chosen but rather reflect deep and critical thinking about goals of the project.

Success criteria are like a builder’s manual. These set of specifications should allow others to recreate a product and tackle all aspects of the product. When creating products, students always have to have a reason for why a criteria has been chosen.

Students use success criteria when assessing whether their product was successful, so they need to be specific and detailed. There are several ways to do this and students must ensure they have thought through all aspects of intended product goal. Below is a general framework that can be used to guide success criteria development.