For compliance, risk and people leaders
What is your completion record actually a record of?
Your organization keeps completion data because it evidences that training happened. We have published a run against a legally mandated course showing exactly what one such record was based on. You may want to know whether yours is based on the same thing.
The question
Nobody checks what sits underneath the number.
Completion rates are reported upward, retained for years, and produced on request. The reporting is scrupulous. What almost nobody examines is the step at the very bottom: what the course had to observe before it told the LMS someone had completed it.
That step is set in the course package, usually by a checkbox on an export screen, often by someone who left the organization years ago. It is invisible in the LMS, invisible in the dashboard, and invisible in the report that reaches you.
A published example
One mandatory course, traced end to end.
This is Case A in our published runs. A compliance course whose own first page states that the training is required by the law it covers, and must be completed by every human resources professional and effectively every manager in the organization. We did not author it and were not engaged by its publisher.
The learner opens the course
73 pages of instruction, 15 knowledge checks. Everything looks normal.
The correct answer to every question is in the page source
Each check ends with a line of JavaScript naming the right option. Not obfuscated, not server-side. Fifteen questions, fifteen visible answers.
Wrong answers cost nothing
The check runs in the browser with unlimited attempts, and the code that would have re-locked the Next button after a wrong answer is commented out.
No score is ever sent to the LMS
We searched the entire package. Only the generic API wrapper contains a reporting call. No page in the course reports a score, a status or an interaction. The manifest declares no pass mark.
Reaching the final page is enough to trigger the completion path
The final screen congratulates the learner and directs them back to the LMS to print their completion certificate.
What that record establishes
That a browser reached the last page. It does not establish that any question was answered, that any answer was correct, or that the learner read anything. Those facts were never captured, so they are not in the record and cannot be recovered from it.
The organization holding this data is not doing anything wrong. It is reporting what the course gave it. The course gave it attendance.
Read the published run or the full report. Both are free, and the second is the deliverable a client receives.
Not confined to one course
We found the same failure pattern in three unrelated courses.
- Case A: no score reported. Completion was reaching the end.
- Case B: an 80% pass mark existed, but the exported package reported completion only.
- Case C: an 80% pass mark existed, but success was configured as viewing 75% of the course.
Different organizations. Different authoring tools. Different years. Same underlying problem: the assessment existed, but the completion record did not depend on it. None of that is visible in an authoring-tool preview, which is why it survives review and reaches production.
What to do with this
Ask your LMS team these six questions.
You do not need us to ask these. If your LMS administrator can answer all six confidently for your mandatory curriculum, you have already eliminated the specific risk described on this page, and it cost you one conversation.
Ask about your mandatory courses, in this order
- Does the course report a score, or only a status? If only a status, every other question is academic.
- What condition triggers completion? Passing an assessment, viewing a percentage of content, or reaching the final page.
- Is there a pass mark, and is anything evaluating it? These are two separate questions and the second is the one that matters.
- Can a learner advance without attempting the assessment?
- Where are the correct answers stored? In the package the learner downloads, or somewhere they cannot reach.
- Who last verified any of the above, and when?
What we are and are not saying
We are not lawyers and this is not advice about your obligations, your liability or the evidentiary weight of anything you hold. We have no view on what your records need to show.
What we can tell you is narrower and factual: we have examined published course packages and established what their completion signals were actually based on. Whether that matters to your organization is a question for your counsel and your compliance function, not for a vendor. We think it is worth them being asked before somebody else asks them.
If you want it checked
What a Preflight answers here.
A Learning Preflight examines the package a learner actually receives and reports, among six other dimensions, exactly the chain above: what is scored, what is reported, what triggers completion, and whether a learner can reach the end without demonstrating the capability.
That last one is our hard gate. If a learner can receive the required completion record without demonstrating the capability, the course fails outright regardless of every other score, because a course that cannot distinguish those two learners cannot produce a record that distinguishes them either.
- One course, fixed price, ten business days.
- The report names the condition, the evidence and the fix, in language a non-specialist can follow. Examples are published in full.
- If we don’t find a single critical issue, you don’t pay.
- For a mandatory curriculum, courses can also be tested on a recurring cycle rather than audited after a concern. Bulk and retainer options exist for that.
- If the question is what the whole library contains rather than whether specific courses hold up, that is a Portfolio Intelligence engagement.
Start with the course you would least like to be asked about.
Ten business days, a scored report, and a plain answer to what your completion record is based on.
Written for compliance, risk and people leaders · not legal advice · publishers of the courses examined are blinded · hello@actyra.com