Capstone Assessment: How CAIDA Is Judged

Attendance earns nothing. The credential is granted only on demonstrated work, and a capstone can come back Not Yet Demonstrated — which is exactly why passing means something.

What gets assessed is your own work. Every domain ends in a capstone that is a real deliverable from your job: a live research question, a real dataset, a decision you own, a communication you must deliver, a workflow you actually run, or a tool your team needs. Nothing is simulated. And what’s examined isn’t only the artifact — it’s the direction trail behind it: what you delegated, how you framed it, what context you supplied, what you validated before relying on it. A polished artifact by itself proves nothing.

Every capstone is scored on the same eight abilities. Delegate, Frame, Context, Plan, Steer, Validate, Land, Capture — each rated independently on a four-level scale: 0 Not evidenced, 1 Developing, 2 Demonstrated, 3 Strong. All eight must reach at least Demonstrated. A weak ability is never averaged away against strong ones; a 0 or 1 anywhere triggers clarification, guidance or resubmission.

Three further conditions have to hold, and none of them can be satisfied by good writing: the domain’s real-use requirement is met, the evidence is authentic and verifiable, and no Responsible Direction red line is left unresolved. A capstone that crosses a red line cannot pass until the issue is corrected, whatever the scores elsewhere.

A human decides, always. Your capstone is pre-evaluated offline by your trainer, then confirmed in a mandatory live viva. AI may help summarise; it cannot pass or fail anything. Trainers complete CAIDA onboarding, work from common rubrics, and calibrate against shared anchor exemplars so the standard holds across batches. Every viva asks a question that is hard to prepare for: when should this result not be used?

And the credential needs more than two passed capstones. At least one must be in actual workplace use, and at least one reusable Skill must have been successfully run by someone other than you, from your written instructions, without you standing beside them. That last test is the sharpest one — it is where capability stops being personal and becomes transferable.