All NPC Master's Degree candidates must complete a culminating project during or after the completion of the student's final course in the program. This culminating project requires students to demonstrate their mastery of the skills developed during their programs.
To complete this project, students must develop a full-length research project, appellate brief, journal article or academic writing sample. The student may choose to use an existing writing sample, such as a paper that the student has written as an assignment during the Master's Degree program or may be another written work product of the student.
At the outset of the student's final course in the Master's Degree program, a faculty advisor will contact the student. The faculty advisor must be a faculty member at NPC with a Doctorate in a field related to the student's program.
The student and the advisor shall, by telephone, email or web conference, discuss the requirements for the project at the advisor shall guide the student on choosing an existing writing as a basis or in starting from scratch.
The student shall, in a timeline governed by discussions with the advisor, create a proposal or outline for the project and submit to the faculty advisor. The advisor and the student will discuss the sufficiency of the outline. The student shall then create a first, subsequent and eventually final draft of the project, with assistance from the faculty advisor along the way as needed.
To be considered complete the NPC Dean or Director of Education must determine that the project demonstrates mastery of the program outcomes by demonstrating mastery of the applicable research, organization and writing skills taught by the program.
A grading rubric is developed for each Master's degree program that is used to measure the ways in which mastery of the program objectives must be demonstrated for the project to be considered completed. The grading rubric for the culminating project is developed by the Dean and Director of Education, in consultation with the curriculum committee and advisory committee.
Students are eligible for graduation only upon the latter of the final approval of the student's culminating project by the Dean or Director of Education and the student's completion of the requisite courses and number of credits constituting the program.