The Grade 11 Practical Assessment Task

The Grade 11 Practical Assessment Task

The Grade 11 PAT runs the same three phases as Grade 10 but expects more: a real design problem, genuine research, and presentation drawings using the conventions learned this year.

Phase 1 — brief and research. State the need, the user and measurable constraints. Research must be analysed, not merely collected: for each existing solution, say what it does well, what it does badly, and what that implies for your design.

Phase 2 — concepts and development. Several genuinely different concepts, evaluated against your stated constraints. Grade 11 expects the evaluation to be explicit — a table scoring each concept against each constraint, with a written justification for the one you take forward.

Phase 3 — presentation drawings. Working drawings to convention: correct projection, sections where the interior matters, dimensions from datums, a title block and, where the design has multiple parts, an assembly drawing with a parts list.

Worked example. A research section that lists three existing products with photographs and no analysis scores poorly. The same three with a short note on each — "this one is stable but too heavy to move" — directly generates a constraint, and that traceability is what the evaluation criterion rewards.

Core checkpoint: Every design decision should trace back to a stated constraint, and every constraint back to the research.