abstract
- Capstone exams are an important part of student preparation for their professional life in our school. They are useful for students to analyze the knowledge they have retained at the end of their professional studies. We selected two mayors to compare their commitment to preparing for the capstone exam and their view of the workshop they attended to prepare for the test. We observed that the students changed their point of view about the workshop before and after the exam, and they did not work as they originally proposed to commit to their preparation. As a result, more students did not perform as expected on the exam; 78.8% of the student sample thought they would pass the exam vs. 42.0% of the sample got a passing grade. To improve capstone exam test results, we suggest enhancing several workshop sections, helping students with their organization skills, and providing them with an enlarged reference list of practice problems. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.