How Evidence Scoring Works: MC and OC Criteria Mapping

Each piece of evidence is assessed against one or more criteria. An assessor reads your evidence document and asks: does this demonstrate what the applicant claims it demonstrates, for the criterion they have cited?

The scoring is not about how impressive your overall career looks. It is about whether each specific document makes a clear, substantiated case for the criterion it is mapped to. A document that is generally impressive but does not cleanly map to OC1 or OC2 does not help your OC1 or OC2 score.

This is why criterion mapping matters from the start. Before you gather evidence, you need to know which criteria you are making the case for. Then you gather documents that specifically address those criteria, not documents that demonstrate you are a good technologist in general.

One of the central rules of the Tech Nation assessment is this: if you say it, someone else must independently corroborate it. If you claim in your personal statement that you built a product with 100,000 users, there must be a document from an independent source that shows 100,000 users.

This rule catches many applications out. An applicant writes a strong personal statement, references achievements accurately, and submits what they consider solid evidence. But the evidence is their own description of their work, not independent corroboration. A blog post you wrote about a product you built does not independently verify the product's success. A press article from a journalist who covered the launch does.

The principle applies to reference letters too. A referee who says "this person built our company's core recommendation system, which now handles 40 million requests per day" is corroborating a specific achievement. A referee who says "this person is exceptional and I recommend them" is not providing evidence of anything particular.

For each optional criterion you choose, assessors look for evidence that is both relevant to that specific criterion and backed by independent sources.

OC1 (Technical Innovation) scores well when: a patent has been cited by other patents or products, an open-source project has significant and demonstrable usage by other organisations, or a technical methodology has been adopted and cited by others in industry reports or academic papers.

OC2 (Product Growth) scores well when: growth metrics come from a third-party analytics tool or independent industry report, revenue figures come from a credible external source such as a published company report or verified press article, or user numbers are corroborated by press coverage rather than internal data you provided yourself.

OC3 (Industry Recognition) scores well when: conference invitations come with documentation of the event's selectivity, awards come with clear documentation of the award criteria and selection process, and press coverage is from independently recognisable publications with a national or international audience.

You can submit up to 10 evidence documents, with a maximum of 3 A4 pages each. The question is not how many you submit. The question is whether each document you submit clearly advances one of your criteria.

A common mistake is submitting 10 documents because 10 is the maximum. If five of those documents are weak, they dilute the overall impression and may create inconsistencies that undermine the stronger ones. Eight strong documents are better than ten of mixed quality.

Plan your evidence documents around your criteria. If you are making the case for MC1, OC1, and OC3, think about how many documents you need to adequately demonstrate each. You do not need equal numbers for each criterion.

Every evidence document must be a PDF. Not a link. Not a cloud document. Not a screenshot without annotation. A PDF that captures the relevant information on the page itself, in a format an assessor can read without clicking anything.

This rule trips up more applicants than any other technical requirement. An assessor cannot click a link in your evidence document. If your evidence is a webpage, a Google Analytics dashboard, or a GitHub repository, you need to take screenshots, annotate them clearly, and export them as a PDF. The annotations should explain what the reader is looking at and why it matters for the criterion you are citing.

Three pages is a strict limit per document. If your evidence requires more than three pages to make the case, edit it down or find a better document. Do not rely on an assessor connecting dots that are not explicitly on the page in front of them.

Weak evidence tends to share the same characteristics: it is self-authored, unverified, overly generic, or impossible to assess without external reference.

Self-authored means you wrote it, published it, and submitted it as proof of your own achievement. A blog post on your personal site claiming your open-source tool is widely adopted is self-authored. The same claim made by an independent tech journalist is not.

Overly generic means the document demonstrates that you work in tech and have done things, but not that you have done the specific thing you are claiming for this criterion. Generic does not score.

Impossible to verify means the information is presented with no external reference point. A screenshot of a private dashboard showing user numbers, with no context for where those numbers come from and no way to cross-reference them, will not satisfy an assessor who is required to validate your claims.