How to lay out an ophthalmology ST1 portfolio
Every other domain on the form is a record of something you did years ago. This one is a record of an afternoon you have not spent yet.
Overall portfolio layout and quality is scored in its own right, and it is the only domain where the work and the points are separated by nothing at all.
It is also the one candidates understand least. In SmartOST's study of how confident candidates felt about each domain of the evidence folder, layout and quality came last, a long way behind everything else. People know roughly what a publication is worth. Almost nobody knows what a well-presented portfolio looks like.
This post is about what it looks like. It comes from the portfolio webinar SmartOST ran for this cycle's candidates, and it sits underneath rules 12 to 16 of the sixteen unwritten rules. Those rules say what to do. This is how to do it.
Why presentation is scored at all
The reason is worth having in mind for everything below, because it explains which details matter and which do not.
An assessor is working through a large pile of portfolios. The webinar's presenters describe the work as cognitively demanding and repetitive, which is a polite way of saying that by the fortieth portfolio nobody is reading carefully. Their point follows from it: evidence that is not presented clearly can be missed even when it genuinely meets the criteria.
So layout is not being scored as neatness. It is being scored as the probability that your work is found and understood by somebody tired. Every rule below is a way of raising that probability, and anything that does not raise it is decoration.
What an assessor is actually judging
This domain is unusual in having nothing to upload, and unusual again in how little is published about it. The recruiter's description of it runs to one sentence, "How the portfolio is presented in layout and organisation will be assessed". That is the whole of it, and there is no marking grid behind it that anybody outside the process has seen.
So what follows is a working definition rather than a published standard. SmartOST's portfolio tool scores this domain against four bands, written to give that sentence some content:
- Poor. Confusing structure, hard to find evidence.
- Basic. Evidence present, but harder to follow or inconsistently arranged.
- Good. Generally clear, with minor inconsistencies.
- Excellent. Very clear sections, logical flow, consistent formatting and naming.
Nobody is marking you against those words. Read them as a description of what a well-presented portfolio looks like rather than as the standard you will be held to.
What is worth taking from them is the gap between the top two. It is not more structure. It is the absence of minor inconsistencies: one item titled differently from the rest, one domain ordered another way, one scan at a different size. Getting to good is about doing the work. Getting past it is about doing the same thing every time.
That is the standard the rest of this post is aimed at.
A contents page in front of every domain
One page at the front of each domain, listing what the domain contains. Each entry is a descriptive title and the page range it covers.
The page range is the part people leave out, and it is the part that does the work. A title alone tells an assessor what is in there. A title with a page range tells them where, which means the contents page answers the question instead of starting a search. It also turns your portfolio into something that can be checked against the evidence folder in one pass, which is exactly what an assessor working through a pile is trying to do.
Write the titles for somebody who has not read the item. "Audit" is not a descriptive title. "Closed-loop audit of post-operative follow-up intervals" is one, because it says what the work was without the page having to be turned.
Title items the way the evidence folder titles them
Lead each item's title with the evidence type it is claimed under, in the evidence folder's own words, and then say what the work was.
The reason is mechanical. An assessor is matching your items against the evidence folder's list of evidence types, in its wording rather than in yours. A title that starts with your own summary makes them translate before they can match. A title that starts with the evidence type is already in their language, and the match is done before they have finished reading the line.
This is also the cheapest consistency there is, and consistency is what the top band is made of. Pick the pattern once, evidence type first and description second, and apply it to every item in the portfolio.
Order items the way the evidence folder orders them
Within each domain, put your items in the sequence the evidence folder puts them in. Rule 15 of the sixteen says why. Two things make it harder than it sounds, and both are decisions worth taking deliberately rather than by feel.
The first is the instinct to lead with your best work. It is a strong instinct and it is the wrong one here. Nothing in this domain rewards a strong opening, and an order chosen for impact is an order nobody can predict, which costs you the only thing the sequence was buying.
The second is what to do about the evidence types you have nothing for. Leave the gap where it falls. A portfolio that closes ranks around an empty evidence type can read as complete, and an assessor who notices the omission later has to work out whether anything else has been quietly moved. A gap in the expected place is read as a gap. A gap somewhere unexpected is a question about everything around it.
Where two items sit under one evidence type, keep them together and pick any order you like between them. Consistency is a property of the pattern across the portfolio, not of the ranking inside a pair.
Make the joins obvious
It should never be unclear where one item ends and the next begins.
This sounds trivial and it is the most common way evidence gets misread. An assessor who cannot tell whether page four is still the audit or the start of the teaching item has two bad options: read back to find out, or assume. The webinar's presenters name the second one as a real risk: a certificate taken for part of the item before it may be scored there rather than where you claimed it.
Fixing it takes very little. A separator page, or a consistent header on the first page of every item, or simply a title block at the top of each item that looks the same every time. The mechanism does not matter. What matters is that the same mechanism is used at every join, which is the consistency the top band is asking for.
Where to start
Start with the contents pages, because they are the only part of this that changes what an assessor does rather than how they feel about it. Then make one pass for titles and one for order, each across the whole portfolio rather than domain by domain, because inconsistency is the thing you are hunting and it only shows up when you look at everything at once.
For the domains and the evidence rules underneath all this, see what the ophthalmology ST1 portfolio actually requires. For the decision about what belongs in the portfolio in the first place, see what goes in and what stays out.