For Higher Education

Develop students who can make the call, and prove they're ready.

In a Capsim simulation, students work through real business scenarios where they own the decisions, then live with the consequences. Every call becomes evidence of what they can do: the assurance-of-learning data you can actually use.

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See it mapped to the course you teach.

Trusted by business programs at University of Pennsylvania NYU University of Florida The University of Texas at Austin Bowling Green State University

Team Andrews · Round 2Their call

Redesign the product for a new segment?

One call, every course at once:

Marketingthe buyers to win
Financethe margin to bet
Operationsthe retool to absorb
R&Dthe spec to push

HoldCommit

What we offer

Practice decisions. Build judgment. Prove learning.

Business simulations for the strategy core, inbox simulations for skills and concepts, and assessments that turn it all into evidence. Run one or run all three, each fits the course you already teach.

Builds judgment

Business Simulations

Turn the strategy course into a company students run: teams make the calls for real stakes across multiple rounds.

Strategic management & capstone
Strategy fundamentals
International strategy
Sustainability

Explore the simulations → Builds decision skills

Inbox Simulations

Build decision skills without changing your syllabus: real-world scenarios students work through one decision at a time.

Gateway & intro courses
Leadership & soft skills
Faculty-authored simulations

Explore inbox simulations → Proves learning

Assessments

Prove the learning happened: validated, standardized measurement of individual and team competency you can compare wherever you run it.

Assurance of learning
Program outcomes
Individual & team competency

Explore assessments →

Students can ace every course, and still not be ready for the job.

Marketing, finance, operations, strategy: each taught well, each graded separately. The transcript proves they passed the subjects. It can't show whether they can make the call when information is incomplete and every function pulls at once, which is exactly the judgment employers are hiring for.

Don't add another case to the syllabus. Change the conditions they decide in.

Transcript · BBA

Sam Rivera Senior · GPA 3.8

MarketingA
Corporate FinanceA−
Operations ManagementB+
StrategyA

How judgment gets built

What makes them ready is real-world conditions

Your lectures, cases, and textbook all stay, Capsim wraps a business around them. Student teams take the seat and run it for real stakes, where one decision pulls on every course they've taken.

No Right Answer

They have to decide anyway

Incomplete information, competitors whose moves they can't see, tradeoffs that won't resolve cleanly. There's no answer key.

Cascading Tradeoffs

Every lever pulls another

Price moves volume, volume moves capacity, capacity moves cash. They stop thinking like majors and start thinking like managers.

Compounding Consequences

Decisions compound. There's no reset.

The call they made a year ago is the mess they're managing today. They can't cram or retake their way out of it.

Three conditions — uncertainty, tradeoffs, consequences — become pressure. Pressure is where judgment forms.

From judgment to readiness

Where learning becomes evidence

Every decision your students make becomes evidence, and that hands you what lectures and cases can't: assurance-of-learning data on the judgment behind every grade.

A behavioral record, not a self-report
You see how students decide when the call is theirs, not how confidently they wrote about it afterward.
Nothing for AI to look up
The judgment accumulates across rounds of their own consequences, there's nothing to paste into a chatbot. Assessment questions share a stem but draw on each student's unique simulation, so the answers can't be borrowed either.
Mapped to your learning goals
Results land against the program outcomes you already report on — function integration, critical thinking, analysis — in language your accreditor recognizes.

Learning Evidence ReportOn track

Sam RiveraCapstone · Section 02

87BUSINESS-READY

Business function integration

Critical thinking & decisions

Analytical & quantitative

Communication

Evidence from simulation decisions and assessment responses

Illustrative example, not real data.

It measures knowing how, not knowing about. That's what accreditors and employers are asking for.

What judgment produces

Walk into your program review with evidence

The point was never the simulation. It's what it leaves you holding: students ready to make the call the job demands, and the data to prove it to anyone who asks.

Students who finally get it

The moment the silos snap together, marketing majors arguing production capacity, accountants arguing market share. The mindset employers keep asking for.

Assurance of learning without the scramble

The evidence accumulates as the course runs. When the accreditation cycle comes around, the data is already there.

One yardstick across sections and semesters

Standardized and comparable, so a strong score means the same thing no matter who taught the section.

Graduates who can prove it

They leave with more than a transcript, a company they ran, decisions they can walk through in an interview, and evidence of judgment employers don't usually get to see.

Assurance of learning · Capstone, all sections

Business function integration84%at/above target
Critical thinking & decisions81%at/above target
Analytical & quantitative78%at/above target

Three sections, one measure, evidence attached to every score

Illustrative example, not real data.

Faculty workload

What running it actually takes

The most common worry we hear from faculty is workload — a simulation sounds like more prep, more grading, more class time. In practice it's the reverse, and it gets lighter every term you run it.

Your first term

We set it up with you

We train you, build your first course with you (or for you, if you'd rather), and hand you sample syllabi, ready-to-use assignments, and graded activities — so you spend your time teaching, not configuring. After that, standing up the next term takes about 15 minutes: copy last term and go.
Grading

Rolls up on its own

Rounds process automatically and scores roll up without hand-grading. The AI Debrief Tool turns each round's results into a ready-to-run debrief in seconds, instead of one you build by hand.
In your course

Launches from your LMS

Single sign-on and gradebook sync with Canvas, Blackboard, and the rest — students launch straight from your course, and grades flow back on their own.

The busywork runs itself. The teaching stays yours.Explore the Instructor Masterclass →

Why programs choose Capsim

What makes this different from the other ways to teach business

vs. case studies

Their own consequences, not someone else's

A case has an answer waiting in the teaching note, and AI writes a polished case analysis in seconds. The sim has neither. Students make their own calls and live with them, round after round.

vs. other simulations

It scores the student, not just the company

Most sims tell you which team won. Capsim also measures the judgment of each person in it, with validated assessment mapped to your program outcomes.

vs. capstone projects

The same bar for every student

Consulting projects vary with the client and the team. The sim doesn't, same conditions, same measure, whoever's in the room.

In the classroom

Where majors become managers

From first-year gateway courses to MBA capstones, three programs that put students in the seat.

5× the enrollment

Dr. Hakim Meshreki put first-year students inside a real business, enrollment climbed from 90 to 455, and students come back after class to ask what they'd do differently.

The capstone, no answer key

Justin Carter runs North Alabama's Strategic Management capstone on the simulation. After 25 years in industry, he grades it the way work does: on performance.

1,000+ students

Rita Cossa scaled Capsim across three online courses, turning distributed students into decision-makers who connect theory to consequence.

“We want to graduate highly skilled, enterprise-ready, mature, and motivated students. We don’t want commodity graduates, everybody looking like Grade A large eggs.”

Geoff MalleckContinuing Lecturer · University of Waterloo

**Chris Harben**Associate Teaching Professor · Penn State University

**Joshua Dwight**Associate Faculty · City University of Seattle

See all customer stories →

Questions faculty ask

Before you bring it to your course

What does Capsim actually do for business education?

Two things. It builds judgment and proves learning. Students run a business under pressure, where decisions ripple across every function and consequences compound year over year. Those decisions become evidence, validated, standardized, and mapped to your program outcomes, so you can show what students learned, not just what they completed.

How is this different from teaching with case studies?

Cases ask students to analyze someone else's decisions after the fact, with the answer already written in the teaching note. In the simulation the decisions are theirs, the consequences carry forward round after round, and there's no answer key, so you see how they actually think, not how well they write up hindsight.

What about AI tools and cheating?

The judgment can't be outsourced. A team's right move depends on its own accumulated position and on what competing teams just did, and the assessment questions draw on each student's own simulation, so there's no shared answer to pass around. AI can describe strategy; it can't live with Round 3.

Does it replace my syllabus?

No. Your lectures, cases, and textbook stay. Capsim wraps a business around them, students apply what you teach inside the simulation, and the concepts finally connect because no decision in the sim uses just one of them.

How is it graded?

Grading is yours to weight. The simulation scores the company against the goals you choose, profit, market share, stock price, and more, and individual assessments score each student, so the company's performance and each student's own learning both count toward the grade.

Will it work for non-business majors or intro students?

Yes. The portfolio spans the curriculum: gateway inbox simulations introduce core concepts in intro courses, and the business simulations run from a first strategy course to the MBA capstone. Instructors regularly use them to give humanities and STEM students real business acumen.

How much work is it for me to run?

Not much, and less each term. Onboarding and training come with your first course; after that, setting one up runs about 15 minutes, and you can copy last term's setup to start the next. Rounds process automatically and scores roll up without hand-grading. Your biggest time-saver is the AI Debrief Tool, which turns a round's results into a ready-to-run debrief in seconds instead of building one by hand, and LMS integration (single sign-on and gradebook sync) means students launch from your course and grades flow back on their own.

What evidence does it give me for accreditation and program outcomes?

A behavioral record of every decision plus validated assessment scores, standardized and comparable across sections and semesters, the assurance-of-learning evidence AACSB and ACBSP reviews ask for, accumulating while the course runs instead of a binder you assemble the week before the visit.

Know what your students can do, before their first job tests it.

See the simulation, the decisions, and the assurance-of-learning data, mapped to the course you teach.