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How Certification Grades Work

Stricter grading for audit purposes

Alex Lemaire avatar
Written by Alex Lemaire
Updated over 3 years ago

Certifications examine minima at the step level instead of averages at the course level. This concept is best explained with data!

Consider a single-course certification with a 50% requirement, say your user gets these grades:

Course

Step

Grade during the certification period

Security 101

Two-Factor Authentication

100%

Security 101

Creating Great Passwords

10%

If LemonadeLXP examined the course average, the user would pass with their average of 55%! This grade, however, could leave you with some trouble in the compliance department. The user has truly lost 90% of the material.

This holds true in situations where you have multiple courses in your certification. The average course grade doesn't matter! Instead, the minimum passing grade is pit against the maximum grade obtained in each step. Here's some more data to show you what counts; consider this play activity across steps that factor into a certification with a 60% pass requirement.

In this example, each course has two steps:

Record ID

Course

Step

Grade

Used in calculation?

1

Security 102

TLS Certificates

45%

2

Security 102

TLS Certificates

50%

Yes

3

Security 102

TLS Certificates

33%

4

Security 102

Encrypted Files

100%

Yes

5

Security 103

Passphrase Generation

65%

Yes

6

Security 103

Perimeter Security

60%

Yes

The user's average across all steps, is 60.2%, however, they have still failed the certification. Their max grade in all steps is calculated with records 2, 4, 5, 6 - and in record 2, their grade does not meet requirements.

In the example above, despite having a step average of 42.66% in their TLS Certificates step, the Certification assigns a grade of 50% for that step in the grade average.

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