Capstone Project Management and Evaluation: A Three-Topic Decision Workflow with Rubric-Based Review and Traceable Approval

Selecting a capstone topic requires more than collecting project titles. A department must retain the alternatives considered, apply a consistent review process, and explain why one proposal was approved. When presentations, scores and approval messages are stored separately, this decision is difficult to reconstruct. This paper presents the design of the Capstone Project Management and Evaluation System (CPMES), a web application organized around a three-topic-to-one-approved-topic workflow. Students submit three structured proposals; assigned panel members assess each proposal against six criteria; and an authorized decision maker records the selected topic with a reason. A comparison view brings proposals, criterion scores and feedback into one place without treating the highest score as an automatic approval. The proposed architecture combines student, panel and administrative interfaces with a relational data model, controlled document access and version-aware decision records. The paper specifies workflow constraints, a scoring method and a small-pilot evaluation protocol. It is a system-design contribution: no deployment dataset, measured improvement or completed user study is claimed. The proposed evaluation will examine decision traceability, task completion and authorization failures before wider use.