The Meaning of CAS

CAS (Creativity, Activity, and Service) hours need to be fulfilled in order for one to receive his or her diploma for the IB (International Baccalaureate) program. These hours can be completed through extracurricular activities such as community service groups and joining team sports. Supervisors will be signing students off for CAS hours as confirmation that a student has been actively participating. At AISG, students are also provided a CAS course where students are allowed to take electives as one of their classes. For example, journalism is an elective but is also a CAS course provided here at AISG. CAS course students will not receive a grade in these courses but supervisors are allowed to not approve students that demonstrated a lack of participation.

Additionally, students are required to write CAS reflections, where one is required to reflect upon a certain activity that he or she hosted as a group or individual. For example, helping out a community service group during International Day count as service hours and participating in MUN (Model United Nations) conferences as creativity hours. In these reflections, students have to reflect upon the events and described some of the outcomes and results.

Many students find writing these reflections annoying as they are additional work to the huge amount of workload already set by teachers for a class. Furthermore, CAS reflections cannot simply be formed of simple sentences. They have to be quality content, and if not, the CAS coordinator may “torture” the student by forcing them to rewrite reflections. The CAS coordinator this year is Ms. Dean, and her job is to make sure each student receives a “pass” in CAS reflections by the IB.

Senior Vicky J. comments: “Although CAS reflections may seem meaningless and irrelevant, they help you remember the valuable experiences and activities you have participated in throughout your high school career.” She has 54 reflections completed but needs many more. “I rant in my reflections which is also a reason why I enjoy writing these.” However, she does not suggest ranting too much in these reflections as your CAS coordinator may think negatively of you.

Without having to worry about filling out CAS hours and writing reflections, Zoe L, a non-IBDP student says, “I’m glad I dropped my IBDP because I do not need to waste time having to write developed paragraphs as reflections.” There are definitely pros and cons to having CAS, but they do indeed take a lot of time.

Not only are CAS reflections an additional workload, filling out CAS hours is a difficult task. Many students find a hard time filling out these hours as some lack of activities while others lack in creativity hours. m