Cas Essay Format

CAS Essay Format for the Class of 2007

Congratulations, you have now reached the final task to complete your IST and IB CAS requirements. The CAS Essay is the most formal CAS assignment to go in your records. It needs to be an honest reflection of your past two years of CAS experience. It must be completed to a high acceptable standard and will be sent with your final transcripts to universities. Please spell-check it carefully and have it proofread by a friend, parent or teacher. A copy of your essay will be included in your final CAS Report of Completion and Transcript.

Your CAS Essay is to be emailed to me (smaine@istafrica.com ) as an attachment, no later than 2:00 PM, February 16th . Please do not delay in writing it. The earlier you email it to me, the sooner I can approve it. If it is not acceptable, I will reply to let you know. In your email subject line please type your name in the following order: “LAST NAME, First Name - CAS Essay”.

All of the CAS Essays together with the CAS Reports from your class will form a booklet that serves as lasting evidence of your accomplishments. This will also give you the recognition you deserve for a job well done. For this reason, the CAS essays need to be standardized and typed neatly using 12 point, “Times New Roman” font. Write a descriptive and interesting title centered at the top of the page in bold (20 point font) and your name centered just below it (12 point font), in Italics. Use the format of this page as a model of how it should look. Do not use the letterhead; I will add your essay to a standard letterhead.

The 500-word CAS essay needs to be a critical self-evaluation and reflection of your entire CAS experience. You need to think back over all of the CAS activities you have been involved in over the past two years and critically reflect on the personal performance criteria shown below as you write your essay. Also, keep in mind, we learn not only from the pleasant experiences, but from also the difficult ones. Be sure to include examples and anecdotes to increase its credibility and to make it interesting to read.

Personal Performance Criteria that need to be considered in your essay:

• The extent to which you have developed personally as a result of your CAS activities. • The understanding, skills and values acquired through the experiences. • How others may have benefited from the activity.

Some further questions to help you: Are there any experiences that you learnt from or that particularly affected you? What challenges did you find yourself facing and how did you deal with them? What was good/bad about CAS for you? What leadership positions did you hold and what did you learn from them? What have you learnt about your strengths and weaknesses? How will you be able to use what you learnt from CAS in the future?

In short: 500 words…Emailed by February 16th …Standard Format…Reflective…1 Page…