Scores, Status and Time
The recorded values look self-explanatory and several are not.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → eLearning:
- Courses & Assignments — the course console — courses, units, assignments
- Learner Records — a learner’s registration against a package
- Course Attempts — each attempt at a package
- Course Sessions — individual launches
- Learning Objectives — objective-level results
Completion is not success
The distinction that causes the most confusion. Completion means the learner reached the end. Success means they passed.
A learner can complete and fail. Reporting on completion alone counts those people as done, which is how an organisation believes it is compliant when a proportion of its staff failed the assessment.
SCORM 1.2 conflates the two; SCORM 2004, xAPI and cmi5 keep them separate. That is the main practical reason to prefer the newer standards.
Raw score against scaled score
- Raw is the number the content reported, meaningful only alongside its minimum and maximum.
- Scaled is normalised, and is what you should compare across courses.
A raw score of 8 is excellent out of 10 and poor out of 100. Reports that show raw scores without the maximum are reports that mislead.
Progress measure
How far through the learner is, where the content reports it. Not every package does, and one that does not will show no progress until it suddenly shows complete.
Time is unreliable
Session time and total time record how long the content was open, which is not how long somebody spent learning. A module left open over lunch records two hours.
Use time to spot anomalies — the zero-second completion, the eight-hour session — rather than as a measure of effort.
Entry and exit modes
Whether the learner started fresh or resumed, and how they left. Useful when diagnosing a package that behaves oddly, and largely uninteresting otherwise.
Credit and launch mode
Whether an attempt counts. Content launched in a preview or browse mode should not produce a compliance record, and these fields are how you tell.
Check them if a result appears that nobody expected — somebody previewing content can generate one.
Report on the right thing
For compliance: success status, within validity. Not completion, not score, not time. Every other measure has a plausible reading that overstates your position.
Worked example
An organisation reported completion for two years and believed it was fully compliant. Moving the report to success status showed roughly one in eleven learners had completed the assessment and failed it, and had never been asked to retake it.
Recommendations
- Report success, not completion, for compliance.
- Use scaled scores for comparison.
- Treat time as an anomaly detector, not a measure.
- Check credit and launch mode on unexpected results.