Useful Description assesses a solver's skill at organizing information from the problem statement into an appropriate and useful representation that summarizes essential information symbolically and visually. The description is considered “useful” if it guides further steps in the solution process.
*A problem description could include restating known and unknown information, assigning appropriate symbols for variables, defining variables, stating a goal or target, a visualization (sketch or picture), stating qualitative expectations, an abstracted physics diagram (force, energy, motion, momentum, ray, etc.), drawing a graph, stating a coordinate system, and choosing a system.