Capstones & projects.

A capstone is unlike anything else in the gradebook. It is not a test score or a term mark — it is a months-long project with a supervisor, a timeline of milestones, a written artefact, and a live defence. The same record covers a bachelor's capstone, a master's thesis, a PhD dissertation, and a polytechnic final project; the type names differ, the shape is the same.

A word on scope, kept honest. The capstone data model and engineare complete — the project, its milestones, the defence scheduling and scoring, and the HND industrial attachment all exist as first-class tables with the full lifecycle. The student and parent view is live. The supervisor's authoring surface on the dashboard — the screen where a coordinator creates a project, schedules a defence, and records a grade — is still being built; today the dashboard is a read-only review queue. We'll mark clearly which is which as we go.

The work a student is remembered for, tracked from proposal to grade.

A capstone project belongs to a student and, optionally, to a programme and a course offering. It carries a type — one of four: capstone, thesis, dissertation, or final project — a title, an abstract, and a document URL for the written work.

Supervision is explicit: one primary supervisor drawn from staff, plus an array of co-supervisors. The timeline is bounded by a start date and an expected completion date, with an actual completion date stamped when the work is done.

The nine states

A project moves through proposal → approved → in progress → submitted → defence scheduled → defended → passed, with failed and withdrawn as the off-ramps. The status is what the student's portal reads to show where they stand, and what colours the supervisor's review queue.

A capstone runs for months, so YESS breaks it into milestones — proposal, literature review, data collection, draft, submission, and whatever else a programme defines. Each milestone carries a name, a description, a due date, an artefact URL, and a display order, and is marked done by stamping a completion timestamp.

A milestone's state is derived, not stored: if it has a completion timestamp it is completed; if its due date has passed and it isn't done it is overdue; otherwise it is pending. That keeps the timeline honest without a status column that could drift out of sync with the dates.

The defence is the climax. Scheduling it moves the project to defence scheduled and records a date and time, a room, and a panel of staff examiners. On the day, recording the result captures a score, a grade letter, and a pass-or-fail decision — and moves the project to passed or failed, stamping the actual completion date on a pass.

Both of these are real operations in the platform's engine today — the scheduling and the result recording are implemented mutations, gated on capstone.manage, that write the structured defence record. What is still being built is the dashboard screen that drives them (covered in the roadmap below); the logic they call is in place and ready.

The live, finished surface of this module is the student's own window onto their project at /portal/capstone. It is read-only by design — the student and parent watch the project; they do not edit it. The page shows the project header (type, status, abstract, supervisor, expected completion), the defence card (the scheduled date, and once it happens the score, grade, and pass), and the milestone timeline with a completed-of-total count.

A parent reaches the same view for each of their children through a child picker — one project at a time, narrowed to their own family by the platform's access rules. If a student doesn't have a capstone yet, the page says so plainly, with a note that the project is set up by the department in the final year.

The supervisor's review queue

The dashboard surface at /dashboard/capstones is the coordinator's review queue: a filterable list of every project by status — proposal, in progress, defence scheduled, passed, failed — each card showing the title, type, student, supervisor, and any scheduled defence, with a click through to the student's record. Today this is a read-only overview; the authoring controls that create and grade projects are the next build (see the roadmap).

Beside the capstone, YESS models the industrial attachment — the three-to-six-month placement at an employer that an HND and many technical programmes require. The record carries the employer's name and address, a named workplace supervisor with their email and phone, the start and end dates, the weekly hours, an approval stamp, a midterm and a final evaluation (each a score and a document), and a final attachment report.

Like the capstone, it runs through its own lifecycle — proposed, approved, in progress, midterm-evaluated, completed, final-evaluated, with failed and withdrawn off-ramps. The final attachment score is designed to combine with the capstone defence into the overall HND grade.

The data, the access rules, and the operations of this module are in place; the student portal is live. The build still in progress is the supervisor's and coordinator's authoring surface — the screens that drive the engine that already exists. Here it is, named plainly.

Proposal. In the final year, the department sets up a student's project — type, title, supervisor, expected completion — in proposal. The student sees it appear in their portal.

In progress. The project is approved and underway. Milestones are laid out with due dates; the student works through them, and the timeline marks each one completed, pending, or — if a date slips — overdue.

Submission. The written work is submitted; the document is attached to the project. The supervisor moves it toward the defence.

Defence. A date, a room, and a panel are set; the project reads defence scheduled in every view. On the day the panel scores the work, records a grade and a pass, and the project's actual completion date is stamped.

Grade. The project is passed (or failed). For HND students, the attachment evaluation combines with the defence into the final grade. The student and their parents see the result in the portal, where the whole arc has been visible all along.

A capstone is the capstone of the academic spine, and it reaches into the modules on either side of it.