This manual is for DB-FPX8400 Assessment 1, start to submission. The opening deliverable of the DBA core normally asks you to arrive as a scholar-practitioner and put a candidate practice problem on the table: a gap at a named organization, sized, dated and sourced, with your own readiness to pursue it described without flattery. It is the first document a doctoral evaluator ever reads under your name, and it is marked criterion by criterion. Below is how our doctoral desk builds it, the shape it takes on the page, and a marked-up excerpt showing the register. Prefer to hand it across? A premium original sample written to your own scoring guide comes back inside 24 to 48 hours, revised free until the criteria clear. Your courseroom may print this as DB FPX 8400 Assessment 1 or DB8400 Assessment 1; it is the same deliverable, and DB-FPX8400 Assessment 1 is what this manual walks through.
One honesty note before the manual: Capella revises courses and scoring guides over time, so always write to the exact scoring guide attached to your assessment in the courseroom. The course identity above is verified on capella.edu; the method and structure below are our tutors' approach to it, not Capella's official rubric text.
How DB-FPX8400 Assessment 1 is scored
FlexPath awards no letter grades. Each criterion on the guide settles on one of four levels, and the level wording is the specification you write to:
| Level | What it means on a candidate practice problem |
|---|---|
| Distinguished | The problem is sited, sized and dated from a source a reader could check, the literature is used to say which mechanisms are worth testing rather than to prove the topic matters, and the writing names what pursuing this problem will demand in access and permission. Something extra is written into each criterion; locate it and perform it. |
| Proficient | The problem is stated at a real organization with evidence behind it and the reading is competent. Sound work, one deliberate move short of the top column. |
| Basic | A subject of professional interest described at industry level, missing the site, the denominator or the comparison period. This is where most first attempts in the doctoral core land. |
| Non-performance | A required element is absent, most often the evidence that the gap exists rather than the conviction that it does. Absent, not thin, is what drops a criterion to the floor. |
The habits this deliverable establishes are graded again in every course that follows. A candidate who learns here to write a claim, its warrant, and the limit of that warrant carries the same three moves into the project sequence, where readers have authority to send work back rather than merely to comment on it.
The DB-FPX8400 Assessment 1 method, step by step
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Turn the scoring guide into the outline
The instructions describe the artifact; the criteria award the points. Number them, give each one its own heading, and park the top-level description underneath before you write a sentence of prose. At doctoral level a paragraph attached to no criterion is writing you did for your own satisfaction, and an evaluator will say so in the comments rather than absorb it quietly.
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Pick the irritation you can actually reach
Begin from something that annoys you at work every month, then test its reach. Is there a site. Will somebody release a number. Does an answer change a decision a named person makes. A problem you cannot reach is not a modest problem, it is one you will abandon in year two.
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Write the problem as one checkable sentence
Name the population, the site, the measure, the magnitude, the comparison period and the source, then stop writing. No cause, no cure, no adjective. Expect to draft the sentence eight times. The version that survives almost always contains a denominator, because a bare count cannot be argued with and a rate can be checked, disputed and defended.
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Run the search and log it while it runs
Business Source Complete and ABI/INFORM Global through the Capella library are the databases faculty expect you to name. Record the date, the string, the filters and how many records survived each screen, then chain citations backward and forward from three strong studies. A log reconstructed afterward reads as fiction, and doctoral readers have seen enough of both to know the difference.
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Read the method section before the argument
Mark every empirical source with its design, its sample and its setting, and decide what each one licenses before deciding whether you agree with it. A field experiment across nineteen branches and a survey of graduate students are not interchangeable evidence, and practitioner material carries no sample at all.
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Self-score, then plan the term against real hours
Read the draft one criterion at a time and mark yourself against the top descriptor without generosity. Anything short gets another pass. Then count the reading hours this work demands against the hours your week holds and decide how many courses you carry, before the session opens rather than in week nine.
A structure that maps to the criteria
Word targets are the planning figures our doctoral desk works to for a deliverable of this kind, not Capella rules; the sections your scoring guide names are the sections you write.
| Section | What it must do | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Position and purpose | Who you are professionally, what you intend to pursue, and why a practice doctorate is the route rather than a research degree. | ~200 words |
| The candidate problem | The gap at a named site with its population, measure, magnitude, window and source, written with no cause and no remedy inside it. | ~250 words |
| Evidence the gap is real | Operating reports, filings or public series establishing that the problem exists outside your impression of it, each figure dated and defined. | ~250 words |
| The scholarly conversation | The empirical work on this class of problem, with designs and samples named, and the mechanisms that work says are worth testing. | ~350 words |
| Readiness and plan | The skills the work demands, the ones you are short on, the pass you will add to your process, and the hours the term contains. | ~250 words |
| Access, ethics and references | The site permission the work will need, your own position inside the organization, and current APA matched in both directions. | ~150 words |
Annotated sample excerpt
An original model paragraph from our doctoral desk, written at the register the top column pays for. Treat it as study material: take the moves, then build your own.
Vantry Fastener Supply sells industrial fasteners to 1,340 contractor accounts across four states and has held close to 11 percent of its regional segment since 2019.1 Between the quarter ending June 2024 and the quarter ending June 2026, its share of orders below $500 fell from 11.4 percent to 7.9 percent while a direct-to-consumer entrant shipping from two coastal warehouses absorbed the difference, a movement of 3.5 points across a segment the firm's own commercial review sizes at $41 million, or roughly $1.4 million of annual revenue at Vantry's 9.6 percent segment margin.2 The problem this project takes up is that Vantry cannot currently say which small-order customers are leaving or on what occasion, because its order system records the account and not the buying event.3
- 1Fixes the site, the population and the baseline before any claim is made. A reader now knows precisely which organization and which segment the rest of the document concerns.
- 2Two dated periods, a rate rather than a count, the source named inside the sentence, and an arithmetic consequence a chief financial officer would recognize. Nothing asserts a cause.
- 3Converts the commercial loss into a knowledge gap a doctorate can close. The revenue problem belongs to the firm; the research problem is the one a committee can approve.
The full premium sample for your exact assessment, written fresh to your scoring guide and issue, is free to request. Study it, revise it into your own voice, and submit work you understand.
The five mistakes that cost Distinguished
- A field of interest wearing the word problem. Channel conflict, customer loyalty and digital disruption are subjects, and not one of them carries a site, a denominator or a closing date.
- Practitioner material asked to do empirical work. A report with no sample and an undisclosed sponsor cannot establish that an intervention works, whatever its exhibits imply.
- A framework credited to the book that summarized it. The criterion is testing whether you went to the original, and a reader who knows the primary text can tell inside a paragraph.
- A scope with no boundary. Examining pricing behavior across an industry is not ambition at this level, it is the absence of a site and therefore the absence of a method.
- A readiness section that reports confidence. The criteria pay for a named weakness with a remedy attached and pay nothing at all for an assurance that you are ready.
Pre-submission checklist
- Every criterion on your scoring guide has its own clearly labeled section
- The problem sentence carries a site, a population, a measure, a magnitude, a window and a source
- No cause and no remedy appear anywhere inside the problem statement itself
- Each empirical source is marked with its design, its sample and its setting
- The search log records databases, strings, filters and records surviving each screen
- Current APA matched both ways, and the draft self-scored against the top descriptor
Want the candidate problem built with backup?
Send the scoring guide and the thing at work you keep running into. A team of eight, including a research analyst and two independent quality reviewers, returns a premium original sample aimed at the top column inside 24 to 48 hours, with the search log attached and free revision until the criteria clear.