CAS approval on ManageBac+ does three things:

1. It allows students to see that their experience is appropriate for CAS.

2. It is one of two steps needed before students can request supervisor reviews.

3. It removes the New Changes flag from the student roster, indicating that the experience has been seen.

As a CAS Coordinator or Advisor, you can approve experiences in two ways:

Admins and CAS Advisors who have been assigned to their students can approve their experiences from under the Reviews & Progress > CAS, SA or SL > Approvals. This will provide a list of experiences pending approval. Select the green next to each experience to approve it, or you can bulk approve the experience via Marks All Experiences Approved. You can click the red X to Reject the experience.

Please note that rejecting an experience will not remove it automatically from student worksheets. It will notify the student via e-mail, who can then edit or delete the experience as needed.

On the student's worksheet, you will see all of the student's experiences. Find the experience that has not been approved by looking for the To be Determined status. Clicking the status button for any Experience listed will allow you to approve it.

Choose the Approved option from the dropdown menu. This will notify the student that their experience has been approved and that they are able to proceed.

Below is the legend for the different statuses applicable to each experience:

When a new experience is added, the To be Determined status is automatically applied. When the CAS Advisor reviews it (see #1 above), they have the option to Approve it, or to Reject it with a note for what you'd like to see the student update about the experience itself (such as type, description, date, etc.)

FAQ: Why do I need to use this Approval status?

To answer CAS questions or add reflections, students should go to either the CAS Questions or Reflections & Evidence tabs within a CAS experience on their worksheet.

If the experience has been approved and all reflections and evidence have been added, students can click Request Supervisor Review. This will send an e-mail to the experience supervisor to review online (see sample below). The Supervisor Review email will also contain the experience Reflections & Evidence.

Note: The Supervisor email will be locked once students click Request Supervisor Review.

Alternatively, if there is no supervisor email listed, students can click on CAS Completion Form. This will create a PDF of the experience information which can be printed and signed by the experience supervisor manually. The CAS Completion Form will not include the Reflections & Evidence.

If the supervisor review needs to be reset, the CAS Coordinator or Advisor can click Supervisor Review to edit or remove the review.

If the experience is from a CAS Project Group on ManageBac+, the supervisor can submit reviews directly via the Groups tab. To learn more about this process, click here. 

Recording CAS Interviews

Locking Completed CAS Work

There are two types of locks in CAS:

1. Marking an experience as Complete, which will prevent the student from adding to that experience.
2. Marking the student's CAS worksheet as complete, will give them read-only access to CAS as a whole.

1. Marking an Experience as Complete

Via CAS > Student > Select Experience, use the dropdown menu on the right to change the experience status from Approved to Complete, or visa versa.

If an experience has been marked as 'Complete' and this was not done by you, it may have been done by the Experience supervisor when they completed their review. This setting can be changed by any admin by following the instructions here.

Marking the Experience as "Complete" via the Experiences list will also lock this experience for further changed.

 

2. Marking a CAS Worksheet as Complete

You can see if a student's access to CAS has been changed to read-only by going to the CAS tile in the student's Year Group. 

If the student has a Complete tag next to their name, their worksheet has been locked to prevent further additions or edits.

When the student has completed the entire CAS programme at the end of their DP career, the CAS Advisor will mark a student's CAS programme as Complete on ManageBac+, by ticking the checkbox in the Progress section "Student has completed the CAS Programme" to lock the worksheet. Untick it any time to unlock it again. 

Marking the CAS programme as complete, will automatically also tick all seven CAS Learning Outcomes as completed. 

 

The CAS Outcomes Chart

The Progress section of a student's CAS worksheet shows how many times a learning outcome has been selected during a student's CAS programme.

This information is viewable to students and allows them a form of self-management. As students add reflections & evidence to the experience, they can tie them to one or more of the targeted learning outcomes of the experience itself.

• The numbers in the yellow bar show the total number of experiences (approved and pending) addressing that learning outcome. (ie this number increases as students add a CAS experience and tie them to Learning Outcomes).
• The numbers in the green bar show how many experiences with that learning outcome have been addressed (ie this number increases as the student adds a CAS reflection and ties it to the targeted Learning Outcomes, or answers a CAS question that is targeting the Learning Outcome)
• The total number of reflections uploaded by the student will display in black at the bottom left. 

Please note however, it is still the experience supervisor who, during the supervisor review stage, checks off if the student actually achieved the outcome or not.

It is then for the student's CAS advisor to confirm if the outcomes have been completed and if the student's overall CAS programme is completed.

Thus the flow of Learning Outcomes would be as follows:

1. Planned: Student lists which Learning Outcomes they plan to address (Yellow/Orange bar)

 

2. Addressed: Student checks off which Learning Outcomes have been addressed (Green bar)

3. Achieved: Supervisor checks off if the Learning Outcomes have been Achieved in the specific activity. 

4. Completed: CAS Advisor checks off if the Learning Outcomes have been Completed across the student's entire CAS programme.

Archiving CAS Experiences

Archiving Experiences in Bulk

Any admin can bulk archive a year group's previous CAS or SA experiences via Year Groups > Select Year Group > Edit Year Group Settings.

On the right, select the date prior to which Experiences are to be archived and click Archive Experiences. All experiences with end dates prior to the archive date will be archived.

For example, if May 3rd, 2021 is chosen as your archive date, then all experiences with an end date prior to May 3rd will be archived. Once you have chosen your archive date, you will be prompted to confirm the process. Once confirmed, please be patient while the archiving process runs. It may take several minutes for all your experiences to be archived depending on the number of students in the year group.

Archived experiences are still available from the sidebar of the CAS worksheet by clicking Archived Experiences. If you still notice experiences appearing that should have been archived, please adjust the end-dates to ensure that they fall before the archive date. You can then re-run the archiving process.

Unarchiving Experiences in Bulk

If you ever mistakenly archive your experiences, you can always unarchive them in bulk via Year Group's Overview > Edit Year Group Settings and by clicking Unarchive Experiences.

 

Unarchiving Experiences Individually

You can also unarchive experiences individually by navigating to the student's CAS worksheet, click Archived Experiences, and then Unarchive Experience on the right of the experience title.

Adjusting CAS Learning Outcomes per Year Group

Newly created Year Groups will not have any CAS Learning Outcomes listed. 

Schools can add the default Learning Outcomes provided by the IBO or create their own CAS Learning Outcomes. 

Learning outcomes can be configured and edited via the Edit Year Group Settings page of the year group. 

Case Study: Managing CAS Experiences

In the below case study, we look at 4 different methods to managing CAS, depending on the needs of your school. 

CAS for the IB Diploma Core is managed in different ways at each school— some schools give students free rein to choose which experiences they are a part of while others assign these experiences to students. There are four recommended models for managing which CAS experiences your students are a part of through ManageBac+: managed by the student, managed by student & advisor and managed by the advisor. We’ve outlined all three below to assist CAS coordinators in determining the best fit for your school.

 

Model 1: Managed by the Student

In this scenario, students are solely in charge of adding their own CAS experiences. This is done on their end by going to Year Group Manager > CAS and clicking Add CAS Experience.

They will manually fill out the form for their individual CAS experience and click Add CAS Experience, as seen below.

Their CAS Advisor is notified via email when any new experiences are added and can mark the experience as Approved to indicate to the student that it fits CAS requirements.

This model works best for schools whose students are largely doing their own independent CAS experiences and projects.

 

Model 2: Managed by Student & Advisor

In this scenario, the Advisors add students to experience groups and students can then add the experience to their worksheets. Any advisor on your ManageBac+ account can add CAS projects or experiences via the Groups tab by clicking Add new group.

The Advisor then adds students to the group via the group Members tab by clicking Add Members.

Students can then select the group when adding a CAS experience from their CAS worksheet, which will auto-fill a large portion of their required CAS Experience information. 

This model works best for schools whose students are doing a mixture of school-led and their own individual experiences.

 

Model 3: Managed by the Advisor

Advisors can also control which experiences appear on student worksheets so that students never have to create their own experiences. Follow the steps below.

Step 1: Click Groups > Add New Group

Step 2: Add Students to the group via the Members tab > Add Members

Step 3: Mark all experiences as Approved via the group Members tab

These experiences will then automatically appear on each of the student’s CAS worksheets as approved.

Students will still add their own reflections, but will never need to choose what experiences to include on their CAS worksheet. This model works best for schools whose students will be doing prescribed CAS experiences led by the school.

 

Notes on managing CAS via Groups

For experiences that are added to the student’s CAS worksheet via Method 2 & 3, CAS advisors can manage student CAS experiences entirely via the Groups tab instead of having to go through the Year Group Manager tab.

Please note that if your school has ticked the Lock Approved CAS/SA Activities box via Settings > Security & Permissions, this will prevent students from editing their experience further.

Click on the group Reflections tab to see how many reflections each student has added. Click on a student’s name to see their reflections in detail.

Review students in bulk via the group Reviews page of a group. Here advisors can leave (1) Supervisor comments to review, mark applicable (2) Learning Outcomes as met and mark experiences as (3) completed. Please ensure to (4) Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

Model 4: Guided by Bulk adding pre-filled experiences

In model 2 and 3, we saw its possible to populate certain fields from Activity Groups on to students approved experiences on their worksheets. However, by Bulk Creating Experiences, we can populate all experience fields, developing a completely guided approach. 

Navigate to your Year Group > CAS > on the right-hand side click Bulk Create Experience.

We now have all of the regular experience fields to populate if we wish. At the bottom of the page, select individual or all students. Clicking Add CAS Experience will populate it pre-filled to all selected worksheets. 

This approach could be used for uniform experiences, or even for introducing your students to CAS on ManageBac+ for the first time, to help get them started.