Documentation is the evidence of your problem-solving process. In Digital Solutions, your response to each internal assessment is a document — a record of how you moved from a real-world problem through design decisions to a working solution. The quality of that documentation directly determines your marks.
Each assessment is marked against a set of criteria that reflect the stages of that process: comprehending the problem, analysing it, synthesising and generating a solution, evaluating the outcome, and communicating clearly to a technical audience. Your documentation must make your thinking visible at each of these stages — markers can only award marks for what they can see in your response.
Good documentation also helps you. Planning your user interface, data structures, and programmed components on paper before you build forces you to think through problems early, before they become difficult to fix.
What markers are looking for
QCAA has consistently advised that documentation should be easy to read, clear, relevant and easy to understand. This is assessed under the Communicating criterion, specifically your decision-making about and use of visual, written and spoken features to communicate about a solution.
Follow these rules to give yourself the best chance of meeting that standard.
Document layout
Use a minimum font size of 11pt throughout.
Avoid orphaned headings — if a heading falls at the bottom of a page with the content on the next page, adjust your layout.
Minimise blank space, particularly in tables. You have a fixed page or word limit, so every space counts.
Diagrams
Export diagrams as images (PNG is preferred) — do not take screenshots of them.
Scale diagrams so they are clearly readable at the size they appear in your document.
Text within diagrams should be no smaller than the 11pt minimum used in the rest of your document.
Response limits Each assessment has specific word or page limits set in your assessment instrument. Exceeding the limit can affect how your teacher applies the marking strategy to your response, and responses that stay within the limit while communicating effectively demonstrate the kind of decision-making the Communicating criterion rewards. Check your instrument carefully.