Basics Breakdown: How Does CAS Work?

You’ve probably heard it tossed around by teachers and upperclassmen for years- “Ah, I forgot to do my CAS this month.” “Be thinking about your activities for CAS!” “This is a CAS Board event!” But what does CAS even mean? And how does it work?

CAS, like TOK or the EE, is a graduation requirement for the IB program. The acronym stands for the three strands of the program: creativity, activity and service. Think of these as core pillars of the program, concepts the IBO wants its students engaged in. 

Okay, that’s great. What do I need to do about it? The “actionable items” of CAS can be broken down into 3 essential parts: monthly logs, CAS Board events and the CAS Project.

Monthly CAS

IB thinks it’s important that its students are well-rounded individuals and not just locked up in their rooms studying 24/7, which is a fair consideration. In order to ensure this, you are required to log monthly hours of time you spent on creativity, activity and service. Creativity hours can be anything from painting a school theater set to helping make ornaments for a school Christmas tree. Creative writing and poetry, choreographing a number for the talent show… essentially, if you can prove to your supervisor that you’re being creative, it counts. Activity is a bit more straight-forward: exercise. If you’re involved in school, club or rec sports, you don’t have much to worry about here. If not, that's okay. You can go to the gym, go on a walk in your neighborhood a few times a week, attend yoga classes, whatever you like. Just get moving!

Service is basically just volunteering. Hopefully, you’re already giving back to your community, but if not, this is your opportunity to start helping out every week at the animal shelter or the food pantry. The catch with this strand is that at the beginning of Junior year, you’ll need to choose an “18 months of service” project. From there, it’s exactly what it sounds like: You need to volunteer at your project at least once every month for 18 consecutive months. Yes, that includes summer, so it’s generally encouraged that you don’t choose something that’s directly tied to school. You don’t need to pick something super involved or complicated. Just something you can sustain and that you’ll (hopefully) enjoy. If you aren’t already volunteering somewhere, I recommend checking out a few different places before committing to one.

At the start of junior year, you’ll start logging these experiences in Managebac every month. You’ll update your hours, submit evidence of you doing your CAS stuff, and sometimes write reflections about how your activities relate to certain IB objectives and such

If that sounds like a lot, you’re right. It is. But it's also not. From my experience, most of the extracurriculars I was already doing counted towards CAS. Gymnastics classes? Activity. Lighting designer for theater? Creativity. Volunteer coaching beginner gymnasts? Service. I was lucky enough that I didn’t have to change my schedule at all to accommodate CAS, and I’m sure some of you are in that same boat. Hurrah! However, if your boat is looking a bit like it’s taking on water, don’t stress. You don’t need to be active in every strand every month. If you forget to do something creative in January, it’s okay as long as you did service and activity. You shouldn’t do this multiple months in a row, but once in a while is okay. You also don’t need to log 30 hours of creativity every month- a few will do just fine. 

There are some more specific CAS no-no's and leniencies that will become more relevant as time goes on, but that’s the basics.

CAS Board events

So, there’s this thing. It’s called the CAS Board, and it’s meant to help students whose proverbial CAS boat is looking a bit waterlogged for whatever reason. It’s a student board at each school that brainstorms and organizes opportunities for CAS experiences. It’s actually pretty neat- my CAS Board has hosted cleanups, makerspace activities, learn-to-crochet classes and pickleball tournaments. 

You can go to as many CAS Board events as you like. However, you are required to attend four. The intent here is that you do one per semester for two years, and that’s probably what your teachers will encourage or require. There’s nothing super special about logging the CAS Board events, you just gotta make sure to have them before senior year is over because they are mandatory for IB.

CAS Projects

The CAS Project is kind of like the crown jewel of the CAS program. It’s typically a service project, but it can technically be creative or active if you get it approved by your supervisor. I have a friend who started a sports podcast as his CAS Project as a creative piece and it worked out well for him. Most of the time, though, it’s things like organizing a charity walk, hosting a concert to donate the proceeds, painting a mural to help beautify your school, etc. This website is my CAS Project, falling under the “service” umbrella. The CAS Project is not the same as your 18 months- your project is student-driven and can be a single event. It could also be something like starting a math club at an elementary school, which is a much longer time commitment, but it doesn’t need to be that drawn out. 

You must complete your CAS Project to close out CAS and graduate. The sooner you do it, the easier it will be to close out CAS in your senior year. If you have time in junior year, I would recommend doing it then. It may even be required to do it that year, depending on your school’s rules. Seek clarification from your CAS Supervisor if you aren’t sure. You can do a collaborative CAS Project, and this can definitely make the process more enjoyable. Just make sure to pick responsible friends. Side note: being on CAS Board counts as your CAS Project, if that’s something that sounds interesting to you.

At my school, we are strongly discouraged from doing drives as our projects unless they are specifically requested by the school. This is largely because plopping a couple boxes around campus and hoping people put stuff in them isn’t a super great way to evidence engagement and effort in your community. Even if you aren’t forbidden from doing them, I would generally advise against drives, simply because they are so generic and can have a pretty uncertain outcome. Instead, choose something you’re passionate about and go from there

This was just an introduction to the CAS process, and there are lots of finer details, rules and procedures that you’ll learn in the coming months that will help you to be successful. Different schools do things in different ways, so as always, take the information here with a grain of salt. My last piece of advice is seriously to try and see CAS as an excuse to go do fun things. You can literally tell your parents you’re required by IB to go play beach volleyball with your friends once a month. There’s a lot of flexibility within the CAS requirements that should help you to complete the process in a way that works for you. Don’t forget to log your hours!