The 7 CAS Learning Outcomes Explained (With Evidence Examples)

The seven CAS learning outcomes are the only thing that actually decides whether you finish CAS. Not hours. Not how many clubs you joined. Seven outcomes, each shown at least once, with evidence you wrote down yourself.

Most students find this out in month sixteen. They have a portfolio full of photos and a coordinator asking where outcome 3 is.

This page fixes that. You get all seven outcomes in the IB's exact words, the IB's own descriptor for each one, and — the part nobody publishes — a real sample portfolio entry per outcome. Copy the shape of them, not the content.

Quick answer: The 7 CAS learning outcomes are (1) identify own strengths and develop areas for growth, (2) demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process, (3) demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience, (4) show commitment to, and perseverance in, CAS experiences, (5) demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively, (6) demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance, and (7) recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions. You must show evidence of each one at least once in your CAS portfolio. There is no mark and no hours target — completion is based on the outcomes alone.

What are the CAS learning outcomes?

The CAS learning outcomes are seven statements of personal growth that every IB Diploma student must evidence to complete CAS.

The IB puts it plainly in the official CAS subject brief: "Completion of CAS is based on student achievement of the seven CAS learning outcomes." Your portfolio is where you prove it. In the IB's words again, students "provide the school with evidence of having achieved each learning outcome at least once through their CAS programme."

Three things follow from that sentence, and they matter more than anything else on this page.

One: at least once is the bar. You do not need all seven in every experience. You need each one somewhere across the whole 18 months.

Two: some outcomes repeat, others barely appear. The IB says so directly — "Some learning outcomes may be achieved many times, while others may be achieved less frequently." Commitment shows up constantly. Ethics shows up if you go looking for it.

Three: evidence means something you produced. A photo of you at an event is not evidence. A written reflection explaining what you decided, what went wrong and what you learned is evidence.

CAS itself is one of the three core parts of the IB Diploma Programme, alongside Theory of Knowledge and the Extended Essay. If you want the full picture of how CAS works — strands, stages, portfolio, interviews — read our complete guide to IB CAS first. This page goes deep on the outcomes only.

The 7 CAS learning outcomes at a glance

Here are all seven in the IB's official wording, with the IB's own descriptor shortened into plain English and one line on what evidence looks like.

Note the spelling. The IB's official documents use "recognize" in outcomes 5 and 7. Keep their spelling when you quote them in your portfolio.

Learning outcome 1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

Outcome 1 asks you to write down honestly what you are good at, what you are not, and then do something about the second list.

The IB's official descriptor is short: "Students are able to see themselves as individuals with various abilities and skills, of which some are more developed than others."

That is a self-knowledge outcome, not an achievement outcome. You do not have to fix the weakness. You have to name it and show you worked on it.

Evidence that works:

• A written self-audit near the start of the DP — three strengths, three areas for growth, one sentence each

• A second self-audit twelve months later that refers back to the first

• A goal you set for yourself, with the reason you picked it

• Feedback from a coach, teacher or team member that you responded to in writing

Evidence that does not work: a list of things you are good at. Half of this outcome is the growth half. Coordinators reject entries that are only a CV.

Sample portfolio entry (outcome 1):

September. I am confident in front of a class and I organise things quickly. I am bad at asking for help, and worse at anything that involves ringing a stranger. I chose the food bank because it needs both. My growth target is one phone call a week to a supplier without writing a script first.

March. I have made about twenty of those calls. The first four I wrote out word for word anyway. The fifth I did not, and I forgot to ask about delivery days, so I had to call back. That was the useful one. I now start with what I need rather than an apology.

Two hundred words. It names a strength, names a weakness, sets a target and shows movement with a specific failure. That is the whole outcome.

Learning outcome 2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

Outcome 2 asks for one thing you could not do before, and proof that you can do it now.

The IB's descriptor is generous here. "A new challenge may be an unfamiliar experience or an extension of an existing one. The newly acquired or developed skills may be shown through new experiences or through increased expertise in an established area."

Read that again if you already play an instrument or a sport. You do not have to abandon what you are good at. A pianist of nine years can meet outcome 2 by learning a style they have never played. The IB's own example on their CAS project page is exactly that — "a talented musician could learn a particularly difficult piece, or a different style of playing."

Evidence that works:

• A before-and-after recording, photo or file

• A dated practice log showing the difficulty going up

• A description of the specific technique that was hard, and what fixed it

• A new certification, belt, grade or role you did not hold before

Evidence that does not work: "I improved my leadership skills." Name the skill so precisely that someone could test you on it.

Sample portfolio entry (outcome 2):

I have swum since I was six, so front crawl was never the challenge. Butterfly was. My timing was wrong — I was pulling before my hips came up, so I sank every third stroke.

Coach put me on a two-week drill of single-arm butterfly with fins. Week one was humiliating. By week five I swam 50m legal for the first time, 58 seconds, badly. In April I swam it in 41. The skill I actually learned was not butterfly. It was accepting a drill that made me slower for a month.

That last line is why this passes. It shows the challenge was real.

Learning outcome 3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience

Outcome 3 is the one most students are missing at the final interview, because joining things is easy and starting things is not.

The IB's descriptor: "Students can articulate the stages from conceiving an idea to executing a plan for individual or collaborative CAS experiences. Students may show their knowledge and awareness by building on a previous experience or by launching a new idea or process."

The key word is articulate. You need to be able to walk someone through the stages. That is why the planning paperwork matters more than the event.

Evidence that works:

• Your first rough idea, dated, before anyone approved it

• A timeline or checklist you wrote

• A budget, even a tiny one

• Emails or messages where you asked for a room, a slot, permission or supplies

• A risk list, or the school's approval form with your name on it

Evidence that does not work: a role in an event someone else designed. Being treasurer of an existing club is outcome 4 and 5, not outcome 3.

Notice the IB allows "building on a previous experience". You can inherit a club and still meet outcome 3 — if you changed something and can show the plan for the change.

Sample portfolio entry (outcome 3):

The idea came from my sister's homework. She is nine and could not read the maths word problems, only the numbers. I checked with two teachers at the primary school and they said about a third of Year 4 had the same issue.

Plan: forty-five minutes, Tuesdays, in the primary library, four DP students, six children. I wrote the schedule, asked Ms Perera for the room on 14 September, and made a one-page consent slip for parents because the school office asked for one. First session 5 October. Two of my four volunteers dropped out in week three, so I recruited from the Spanish class instead of my own year. That is why the group is now mixed-year.

Dates, names, numbers, and one thing that went wrong. Coordinators trust entries like this.

Learning outcome 4: Show commitment to, and perseverance in, CAS experiences

Outcome 4 asks you to keep going after the interesting part ends.

The IB descriptor is the shortest of the seven: "Students demonstrate regular involvement and active engagement in CAS."

Two words carry the weight — regular and active. Regular means a pattern over months. Active means you were doing something, not attending.

Evidence that works:

• A dated attendance log across at least a few months

• A supervisor's short confirmation of your involvement

• A reflection written on a bad day, not a good one

• Evidence you continued after the original group shrank or the novelty wore off

Evidence that does not work: one intense weekend. A 30-hour charity event is real work, but on its own it is not perseverance.

Sample portfolio entry (outcome 4):

Week 19. Nobody came. It rained, the pitch was closed, and I sat in the changing room for forty minutes with the cones still in the bag.

I nearly cancelled the rest of term. What stopped me was that Fatima's mum had already rearranged her Thursday shift twice to get her here. So I moved the session indoors to the gym corridor and cut it to thirty minutes. Attendance for the next four weeks was 6, 5, 8, 8. The corridor is worse than the pitch. It is also open in November.

Perseverance is boring by definition. Write the boring week down — it is worth more than the highlights.

Learning outcome 5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

Outcome 5 wants both sides of teamwork — what it gave you and what it cost you.

The IB's descriptor says students "are able to identify, demonstrate and critically discuss the benefits and challenges of collaboration gained through CAS experiences."

"Critically discuss the benefits and challenges" is the whole instruction. An entry that says the team was great meets half the outcome. Coordinators send those back.

This is also the outcome the CAS project is built to serve. A CAS project is, in the IB's definition, "a collaborative series of sequential CAS experiences lasting at least one month" — and at least one project is compulsory. If your project is genuinely collaborative, outcome 5 writes itself.

Evidence that works:

• A record of who did what, and how you split it

• An honest account of a disagreement and how it ended

• A decision the group made that you personally disagreed with

• Something the group achieved that you could not have done alone — say why

Evidence that does not work: "We worked well as a team." That is a sentence, not evidence.

Sample portfolio entry (outcome 5):

The argument was about money. Dev wanted to charge 200 rupees for the concert tickets and I wanted it free with a donation box. He was right that free events get half the promised audience. I was right that our audience were the same families we were fundraising for.

We ended up at 50 rupees plus a box, which neither of us proposed. It raised less than Dev's plan and more than mine. What I learned is that I argue by repeating myself louder. Anjali solved it in one sentence by asking what the money was actually for. I have started asking that question first.

Named disagreement, named resolution, named personal weakness. That is critical discussion.

Learning outcome 6: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

Outcome 6 does not require a plane ticket. It requires you to connect what you did locally to an issue that exists everywhere.

The IB's descriptor is specific: students "are able to identify and demonstrate their understanding of global issues, make responsible decisions and take appropriate action in response to the issue either locally, nationally or internationally."

Read the last five words. Locally is listed first among equals. The global part is the issue, not the postcode.

This is the second-most-missed outcome, and the reason is almost always the same. Students do global work and never write the link down. Teaching older adults to use a banking app is digital exclusion. Running a repair café is e-waste and consumption. A food bank shift is food insecurity. None of that counts until you say it in your portfolio and back it with something real.

Evidence that works:

• A named global issue, in your own words

• One statistic or source that shows the scale of it

• The link between your local action and that issue

• A responsible decision you took because of what you learned

Evidence that does not work: listing the UN Sustainable Development Goals at the top of the entry and never mentioning them again.

Sample portfolio entry (outcome 6):

The issue is digital exclusion — people who are locked out of services because those services moved online. I did not know it had a name until Mrs Iyer could not book her own hospital appointment because the phone line had been replaced by an app.

Our council closed two of its four in-person service desks last year. That is the local version of a global shift. In our eight Saturday sessions we helped 31 people, and 24 of them were over 70. The most requested skill was not email. It was screenshotting a booking so they had proof it existed. That told me the real problem is not skill. It is trust.

It names the issue, quantifies the local version, and lands on an insight. That is engagement, not attendance.

Learning outcome 7: Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions

Outcome 7 asks whether you noticed that your choices had consequences for other people.

The IB descriptor: "Students show awareness of the consequences of choices and actions in planning and carrying out CAS experiences."

Almost every student can meet this outcome and almost none of them write it down. Every CAS experience contains an ethical decision. You just have to notice it.

Some that come up constantly:

• Photographing the people you serve, and whether you asked them

• Posting those photos online for your school's account

• Taking a task away from someone who was already doing it

• Fundraising for a cause you do not fully understand

• Stopping a project when the people relying on it still need it

• Accepting sponsorship from a company whose product works against your cause

Evidence that works: a decision with a real cost, and your reasoning. Ethics entries are only convincing when you gave something up.

Evidence that does not work: "It is important to be ethical." Every coordinator has read that line a hundred times.

Sample portfolio entry (outcome 7):

The school newsletter wanted a photo of the reading group. I said no to faces.

The honest reason I hesitated is that the photo would have helped us recruit volunteers, and we needed volunteers. But these are nine-year-olds who are behind in reading, and the caption would have said so in public. Their parents signed a consent form for tutoring, not for publicity. We sent a photo of the book pile instead and got two volunteers rather than the five we hoped for.

I would make the same choice again. It did cost us something, and pretending it did not would be dishonest.

That entry gives up a real benefit. That is what makes it ethics rather than a slogan.

How many learning outcomes can one CAS experience cover?

One well-chosen experience can evidence four or five outcomes, but no single experience covers all seven honestly.

Here is a worked example. Say you start a Saturday coding club at a community centre and run it for eight months.

Even here, outcome 2 is shaky. If you already code, teaching beginners is not a new skill. That is why most students need a second, different experience — usually a physical one — to carry outcome 2 cleanly.

A sensible portfolio has three to five substantial experiences plus your CAS project. Not fifteen. If you need ideas that fit real timetables, we listed 200 CAS ideas by strand, each tagged with the strands it touches.

The three outcomes students leave until last

Across coordinators the same three outcomes go missing: 3, 6 and 7.

Outcome 3 goes missing because joining is easier than starting. Fix it early. Choose one experience where you are the origin, even a small one. A six-week thing you invented beats a two-year thing you joined, for this outcome only.

Outcome 6 goes missing because students do the work and skip the sentence. Fix it in fifteen minutes. Open the experience you already run, name the global issue behind it, find one credible number, write two paragraphs. You have almost certainly already earned this outcome.

Outcome 7 goes missing because ethics sounds like a topic rather than a moment. Fix it by looking backwards. Find one decision you made where a reasonable person could have chosen differently. Write why you chose what you chose. That is it.

None of these need new activities. They need writing. That is the single most useful thing to know about the CAS learning outcomes.

What a CAS portfolio entry actually needs

Your portfolio is a collection of evidence and reflections. The IB is clear that it "is not formally assessed" — but your coordinator still has to see the outcomes in it.

Every entry that is meant to carry an outcome should contain five things.

1. The date, and the outcome you are claiming. Say it explicitly: "This entry evidences learning outcome 5."

2. What actually happened, in specifics. Numbers, names, places, durations.

3. What was hard, or what went wrong. Entries with no friction do not read as true.

4. What you decided as a result. A change in behaviour is the strongest evidence there is.

5. One piece of supporting material. A photo, a plan, a message, a log, a supervisor's note.

Keep entries short. Two hundred to four hundred words is plenty. Eight strong entries beat forty thin ones, and your coordinator has to read all of them.

Write them within a week of the experience. Reflections written eighteen months later are vague, and vagueness is what fails outcomes.

How your school checks the outcomes

You have three formal interviews with your CAS coordinator or adviser during the programme. That is set out in the IB's official CAS documentation, and every IB World School runs them.

Roughly, they work like this.

Treat interview two as the real deadline. Bring a one-page grid: seven rows, one per outcome, and the experience and entry that evidences each. If a row is empty in interview two, you have a year to fix it. If it is empty in interview three, you have weeks.

CAS also runs for at least 18 months from the start of the Diploma Programme, with what the IB calls "a reasonable balance" between creativity, activity and service. You cannot compress it into a final term, and neither can the outcomes.

Do the CAS learning outcomes affect your IB score?

No. CAS carries no marks and adds no points to your total. The maximum IB score is 45, and every one of those points comes from your six subjects and from Theory of Knowledge and the Extended Essay — never from CAS. Our guide to how the IB points system works breaks that down point by point.

CAS is still a condition of the diploma. The IB's General Regulations list CAS among the activities that must be successfully completed, and a student who does not satisfy the requirements receives DP Course Results rather than the full diploma. So the outcomes cannot earn you anything, and can cost you everything.

In practice, almost nobody fails CAS outright. Schools chase students long before it becomes serious. What does happen — often — is a stressful final term spent manufacturing evidence for outcomes 3, 6 and 7 while sitting mock exams. That is the real cost of ignoring the outcomes early.

The outcomes also map closely onto the IB learner profile — the ten attributes the IB wants every student to develop. CAS experiences are required to "provide opportunities to develop the attributes of the IB learner profile", so the two lists are deliberately related. Referencing a learner profile attribute in a reflection is a quick way to make an entry read like IB writing.

If CAS is eating the time you need for your subjects, that balance is usually fixable in a few weeks — often by trimming one experience rather than adding tutoring. Educifly's IB specialists have coached students through this since 2018, and you can talk it through in a free trial class before deciding anything.

Frequently asked questions about the CAS learning outcomes

How many CAS learning outcomes are there?

There are seven CAS learning outcomes. They are set by the IB and are the same at every IB World School in the world.

You must provide evidence of achieving each of the seven at least once across your CAS programme. Some you will meet many times over. Others you may meet only once, and that is fine.

Do I need to meet all 7 CAS learning outcomes?

Yes. Completion of CAS is based on achieving all seven outcomes, each evidenced at least once in your CAS portfolio.

You do not need to meet all seven in a single experience, and you do not need to meet them in order. What matters is that by your final interview, every one of the seven has at least one piece of evidence attached to it.

What counts as evidence for a CAS learning outcome?

Evidence is anything that shows what you did and what you learned — with your reflection attached. Photos, logs, plans, budgets, messages, supervisor notes and certificates all work as supporting material.

None of it counts on its own. A photo with no reflection evidences nothing. The reflection is the evidence; the artefact supports it.

Which CAS learning outcome is hardest?

Outcome 3 — initiate and plan a CAS experience — is the one students most often lack, because joining an existing activity is far easier than starting your own.

Outcomes 6 and 7 come next. Most students have already earned them through work they have done; they simply never wrote down the global link or the ethical decision.

How long should a CAS reflection be?

Two hundred to four hundred words is usually enough for one outcome. Longer entries are not better.

What makes a reflection strong is specificity — a date, a number, a name, something that went wrong, and a decision you took as a result. Length without specifics reads as padding to a coordinator.

Can one CAS experience cover multiple learning outcomes?

Yes, and a good one usually covers four or five. A long collaborative project you started yourself can carry outcomes 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 comfortably.

No honest experience covers all seven. Outcome 2 in particular normally needs a separate experience where you learned something genuinely new.

How many hours of CAS do I need to meet the outcomes?

The IB sets no hours requirement. Completion is based on the seven learning outcomes, not on time logged.

Many schools still use 150 hours as an internal guideline, split roughly evenly across the three strands. That is a school rule, not an IB rule — ask your coordinator for your school's expectation in writing at the start of the programme.

What happens if I miss a CAS learning outcome?

Your coordinator will ask you to produce evidence for it before they can sign off your CAS completion. In almost every case that means writing a reflection on something you have already done.

If CAS is genuinely not completed, the consequence is serious. The IB's General Regulations state that a student who fails to satisfy the requirements receives DP Course Results instead of the full IB Diploma.

Do the CAS learning outcomes have to be in my CAS project?

No. Your CAS project must be completed, but the outcomes can be evidenced anywhere across your CAS programme.

That said, a CAS project is the easiest place to evidence outcome 5, because the IB defines a project as "a collaborative series of sequential CAS experiences lasting at least one month". Collaboration is built into the definition.

Can I claim the same learning outcome twice?

Yes. There is no limit, and the IB explicitly notes that some outcomes will be achieved many times.

Repeating an outcome does not strengthen your portfolio, though. Once an outcome is clearly evidenced once, put your effort into the ones with empty rows.

Do the CAS learning outcomes get marked or graded?

No. The CAS portfolio is not formally assessed, and no examiner ever sees it. Your school checks it, not the IB.

That is why the standard varies between schools. Some coordinators accept a paragraph; others want plans, logs and supervisor confirmation. Ask early which kind of school you are in.

When should I start tracking the CAS learning outcomes?

From your first CAS experience. Make a seven-row grid on day one and fill a row each time an experience genuinely evidences an outcome.

Students who track from the start finish CAS in a normal week. Students who start tracking in the final term spend that term writing eighteen months of reflections from memory, while revising for exams.

Educifly is a boutique 1-on-1 online tutoring practice for IB Diploma, IB MYP and IGCSE students, founded in 2018. Our IB specialists coach students through the core — CAS, TOK and the Extended Essay — alongside their subjects.