Apprenticeship Capstone Project Checklist and Rubric
Click each of the checklist items below to identify whether or not you have completed the objectives corresponding to that respective item.
Checklist Items
Notes:
- The intended audience is the project’s business stakeholders, not the class or teacher.
- Persuade stakeholders to value the project, don't just describe it.
Incomplete if:
Presentation does not describe the project goals, data, methods, or results. This includes presentations that omit critical information, have substantial errors, or that are too confusing for stakeholders to follow.
Notes:
- Enable yourself to communicate with an audience and the audience to access the content.
- Slides should be well-formatted with visuals that aid your narrative without causing confusion for your target audience of stakeholders.
Incomplete if:
Most slides do not include most items from the checklist (0-2 out of 5).
Notes:
- Engage the project’s business stakeholders in understanding the content, and on the clarity and appropriateness of answers to questions.
- Presentations should engage stakeholders by talking about the project’s value to them.
Incomplete if:
Presentation does not convey the intended content, or most answers to questions are unclear or inappropriate. This includes presentations that are not comprehensible or that skip intended content, as well as non-responses, incorrect responses, or responses that don’t resolve the question.
Notes:
- Explain the value of the project.
- We frame value in terms of the problems and stakeholders that are the focus of the project.
- Students must explain how their projects address a real-world problem.
- A real-world problem is an actual problem faced by an actual stakeholder.
user persona + need + purpose
Incomplete if:
The notebook’s explanation of a project’s value is missing, inaccurate, or difficult to understand. This includes projects that do not actually have value for any real-world problem/stakeholder.
Notes:
- Demonstrate the utility of your data for solving a business problem.
- We frame utility in terms of the properties, source, and business relevance of the data.
Incomplete if:
The notebook’s description of the data’s source or properties is missing, inaccurate, difficult to understand, or irrelevant to the real-world problem of interest. This includes projects using data that are not appropriate for solving the chosen real-world problem.
Notes:
- Good data preparation is reproducible, well-documented, and justified.
Incomplete if:
1) Data preparation is not fully reproducible using instructions and code that is contained in, imported by, or referenced by the demonstration notebook, and/or 2) preparation steps could not have valid rationales for why they will help with solving the real-world problem addressed by the project.
Notes:
- Demonstrate an iterative approach to modeling in your notebook.
- Model building is iterative when it proceeds from a baseline model to more complex models based on rationales that are refined over each iteration.
Incomplete if:
Multiple models are not developed, or the differences between models could not have valid rationales for why they will help solve the real-world problem.
Notes:
- Interpret and evaluate the results of your model(s).
- Choose a final model to evaluate, using appropriate metrics to show its utility.
Incomplete if:
No final model is explicitly chosen, the final model is not correctly evaluated using holdout test data, or the chosen metric is not appropriate for the real-world problem.
Notes:
- Quality is assessed based on readability, repetitiveness, and citation.
Incomplete if:
Code is mostly not runnable, or is difficult to read, repetitive, or improperly cited.
Notes:
- Assess the understandability of the GitHub repo that houses your project.
- Include a README with thorough project documentation, and well-organized and appropriately-named files/folders in your working directory.
Incomplete if:
Repo does not include most items from the checklist (0-3 out of 7).
Warning!
To ensure that you meet each of the objectives for this project, you'll want to consult the rubric below in conjunction with the project checklist.
Grading Rubric
