Why 'CAS tracking' means something narrower than it sounds
CAS has not had an hours requirement since the 2019 diploma review, and software built to log hours is solving a problem the IB stopped asking about. What still needs tracking is different: engagement across the three strands — Creativity, Activity, Service — over a minimum period of around eighteen months, the seven learning outcomes demonstrated through reflection rather than counted, one CAS project sustained for at least a month and combining two or more strands, and three interviews with the coordinator across the programme.
The IB's own CAS guide is the authority on what the requirement is; anything below describes what software should let a coordinator see and check, not the requirement itself.
The honest test of any tool is not whether it can store a photo and a paragraph of reflection. It is whether a coordinator can answer, for the whole cohort at once and without opening a hundred individual files, who has not started, whose reflection is thin against a named outcome, and who is approaching their final interview with the case not yet made.
The checklist: what to test in a demo, not take on trust
Ask for these live against real or seeded data. A feature list will say yes to all of them; a live screen will show you which are actually true.
- Can a coordinator list every student who has not logged anything in the last month, without opening each file?
- Does the tool distinguish an ordinary CAS experience from the CAS project — sustained, month-plus, two or more strands?
- Can it show which of the seven learning outcomes a student has evidenced across the whole programme, not per experience?
- Are the three interviews recorded as dated events with an outcome, or left to a coordinator's memory and inbox?
- Does a supervisor's approval and a student's reflection attach to the specific experience, with a date, or float in a shared document?
- Can you export a student's full CAS record as evidence if a diploma outcome is ever questioned?
Why a spreadsheet and a shared drive stop working at scale
A spreadsheet tracks a cohort of thirty students reasonably well for a term. It does not survive a cohort of a hundred and fifty, each logging several experiences a year, each needing a supervisor, a reflection and — once — a sustained project.
The failure is not dramatic. It is a dozen students who have quietly stopped engaging for two months, invisible in a spreadsheet that still looks complete because nobody has deleted their row. The tool's job is to make that dozen visible without anyone having to go looking for them.
What skodle tracks today
skodle holds a CAS experience as its own record type — CAS_EXPERIENCE — alongside the other supervised projects a school runs: the PYP exhibition, the MYP personal and community projects, and service as action. It is not force-fit into a generic assignment or an upload folder.
Each experience carries a goal, a set of learning goals, a named supervisor, start and due dates, the student's own reflection, and a status the student moves through — Proposed, In Progress, Submitted, Complete — so a coordinator can see where an experience actually stands rather than inferring it from an email thread. Milestones attach to an experience with their own due dates and a completed flag, which is where an interim check-in or a supervisor sign-off gets dated.
Staff can list every CAS experience across the school, filtered by status, and CAS also sits inside the DP core's risk view alongside IA, EE and TOK — the same view that is meant to surface a student who has stopped logging before it becomes a diploma-outcome problem in the final term.
- CAS experiences as typed, tenant-scoped records — not files in a folder
- Goal, learning goals, supervisor and reflection held against the experience
- A status workflow: Proposed → In Progress → Submitted → Complete
- Milestones with due dates, for interim check-ins and supervisor sign-off
- Visible in the DP risk view alongside IA, EE and TOK
- Every change carries an audit entry naming who made it
Where this is the wrong answer
A buyer's guide that ends with the author winning every question is an advertisement, so here is what skodle does not do.
It does not tag which of the three strands — Creativity, Activity, Service — a given experience covers, and it does not map an experience to specific learning outcomes as a selectable field; both live in the goal and reflection text a student and supervisor write, not as structured data a report can total. It does not flag one experience as the CAS project distinct from the others — today that distinction exists only in what the title and goal say, not in the data model. And it has no dedicated record for the three coordinator interviews: recording one means creating a milestone and dating it, which works but is a workaround rather than a purpose-built field.
If your evaluation depends on a system that reports strand coverage or learning-outcome coverage automatically across a cohort, ask to see that exact report in the demo — here or anywhere else — rather than accepting a screen that implies it and finding the gap in October.
What it costs, and what that includes
Pricing is per user, per month, and CAS tracking is not a separate module — every plan includes every feature, so nothing described above sits behind an upgrade.
Spark is $2 per user for up to 150 users. Momentum is $3 per user from 151 to 500. Above 500 users, Pinnacle is a custom plan with volume pricing. Parents are charged at half the staff-and-student rate. When comparing CAS-tracking claims specifically, ask each vendor for the exact screen that lists a cohort's incomplete experiences — that is the feature that actually saves a coordinator's October, not the feature list.
Before you buy: what to ask
Migration and adoption are where a good tool fails in practice rather than in the demo.
- Can existing CAS records be imported, or does the cohort start from zero?
- Who enters the reflection — the student directly, or a staff member on their behalf?
- What does the coordinator's cohort-wide view actually show, live, today?
- Is CAS priced separately, or included in the seat price?
- Give us a sample export of one student's full CAS record before we sign
