Entries that a student chooses to include in a graduation portfolio should demonstrate proficiencies required by the school, district, Regents' regulations, and Rhode Island Diploma System for graduation. Collectively, these entries should reflect the school's Expectations for Student Learning. Students must have ample opportunity to complete tasks that are rigorous and valid in order to demonstrate these proficiencies.

Development of tasks that may become suitable entries in a graduation portfolio is a critical process that requires professional training as well as time for creating, administering, calibrating, and evaluating tasks. It is important in the development of tasks to plan for a sufficient number and types of tasks to ensure that students have ample opportunity to demonstrate required proficiencies in content knowledge and applied learning.

Common and classroom tasks will be the primary source of entries in a graduation portfolio. Schools should create protocols for the development of on-demand and extended common tasks as well as for the evaluation of other tasks that are neither common tasks nor teacher tasks but may, nevertheless, be included in a student's portfolio in order to ensure the rigor, validity, reliability, and fairness of these tasks.