Ophthalmology ST1 portfolio tips: 16 rules that win points
The published criteria tell you what scores. They do not tell you how a portfolio is actually read, and they do not tell you the several ways a candidate loses points they had already earned.
These sixteen rules come from the portfolio webinar SmartOST ran for this cycle's candidates. Every one of them sits in the gap between having the evidence and being awarded the points for it. They assume you have already read what the ophthalmology ST1 portfolio actually requires, which is where the domains, the caps and the evidence rules are set out. This post is the part that is not written down anywhere.
Understanding what scores
1. Read the evidence folder line by line before you claim anything. It is a dry document and it invites skimming. One of its presenters says almost every portfolio they have looked at has some mistake in it, which is a point lost to reading rather than to achievement.
2. Go back further than this year. Medical school projects, an audit from a foundation post, a prize you have stopped mentioning. Most of the form carries no time limit, so the work most often missed is the work you have stopped thinking of as worth claiming. Two parts of it do carry one, and what goes in and what stays out names them before you start digging.
3. Decide where everything is claimed in one pass, not item by item. One piece of work counts once, and belongs in the domain furthest from its cap. That much is published. What follows from it is not: the best home for one item depends on where all the others have gone, so the placements cannot be settled one at a time. List every domain each piece of work could plausibly reach, then place them together. The second and third domain an item could reach are rarely the obvious ones.
4. Use a supervisor letter to turn borderline work into scoring work. A letter that sets out what you actually did, and names the evidence type it meets, lets an assessor award the points without having to infer anything. Borderline work usually fails on ambiguity rather than on substance. Add a reflection wherever the evidence folder asks for one, and see what to ask a supervisor for before you send the request.
5. It is fine to push a little. Include work that is genuinely borderline where a letter can support it. Pushing on everything is a different thing, and rule 8 is what it costs.
6. Take out what clearly will not score. Work that matches no evidence type is not neutral. It is one more thing standing between an assessor and the work that does score.
7. Once a domain is capped, more items earn nothing. This one is published: points past a domain cap do not move anywhere else. It is on this list because it is the rule most often ignored in practice, by candidates who keep feeding the domain they find easiest.
8. Padding a domain can cost you points. The recruiter's 2026 guidance says it is important to follow each domain's list of contents "as precisely as possible as marks may be deducted for including unnecessary information", so a penalty for material nobody asked for is published rather than inferred. That it lands specifically on overall portfolio layout and quality is the presenters' reading rather than a stated rule. Either way, surplus is the risk sitting on the other side of rule 5: what goes in and what stays out quotes the guidance and works through the decision item by item.
Presenting each item
9. Every scan has to be legible. High resolution, the right way up, the whole page in frame. An assessor who cannot read a certificate cannot award points for it, and will not write to ask you for a better copy.
10. Title each supervisor letter for the domain it supports. "Letter of support" tells an assessor nothing. A title naming the domain and the item it backs puts the letter in the right place before anyone has read a word of it.
11. Make the letter say, in words, how the work meets the evidence type. Supervisors write warmly and vaguely by default, because that is what a reference usually needs to be. Send them a short template setting out what the evidence type requires, so that the letter comes back saying it. There is one to copy, along with what to send alongside it.
Presenting each domain
12. Layout is scored in its own right. Overall portfolio layout and quality is a domain on the form with its own points, so presentation is not a courtesy you extend if you have time left. It is also the only domain that needs no new work, and it is the one many candidates overlook. Why it is scored at all is worth holding on to for the four rules below: an assessor is working through a pile of portfolios, and evidence that is hard to find can be missed even when it plainly qualifies.
13. Give every domain a contents page. A short list of what the domain contains, each item under a descriptive title with its page range, so that the whole domain can be taken in before any of it is read.
14. Title your items the way the evidence folder titles them. Use the evidence type's own wording rather than your own. An assessor matching your title against the evidence folder should not have to translate it first.
15. Order your items the way the evidence folder orders them. Follow its sequence within each domain, so that an assessor reading down the evidence folder and an assessor reading through your portfolio are working the same list in the same order.
16. Make the joins between items obvious. It should never be unclear where one item ends and the next begins. An assessor unsure whether page four is still the same piece of work may score it as though it were.
Rules 12 to 16 are the ones with the most to say once you start applying them. How to lay out a portfolio takes each of them further: what good presentation actually means here, what a contents page has to carry, and what a join looks like on the page.
Where to start
If you do one thing from this list, do rule 3: lay out every item against every domain it could reach, and place the lot in one sitting. It costs nothing, needs no new work, and it is the rule that moves the most points.
Then check the total against how the self-assessment is scored, which walks the point ladders domain by domain.