Business Skills Scoring and Completion

Organization

Business Skills courses are divided into lessons. Each lesson contains one or more topics, and each topic contains one or more objectives. The Course Menu for a Business Skills course shows lessons and topics, but not objectives (you can review course objectives in the References section).

The course below has four lessons. Lesson 1 has 3 topics and Lesson 2, 3 and 4 have 4 topics (only the first topic, Lesson Overview of topic 3 is shown below).  

Scoring Logic

The SkillSoft Course Player (SCP) calculates scores for individual objectives, topics, lessons, and the overall course. However, the SCP Course Menu only displays scores at the topic, lesson, and course level. In the example above you cannot tell how many Objectives were in each topic, but you can see the user's score for each topic, lesson, and for the entire course.

Calculating the Course Score

The SCP has two methods for calculating the course score for Business Skills courses. The default method focuses on the performance of the learner with respect to lesson averages, while the alternate method takes into account the total number of objectives.

The default method for calculating the course score is to average of all lesson scores (unattempted lessons are scored as 0%). This scoring method is used when the parameter COURSE_SCORE_BY_LESSON_AVG is set to TRUE in the pageplayer.properties file. The formula used to calculate the course score for this scenario is:

(L1 score + L2 score + L3 score) / # lessons = course score

For example, if a learner scored the following lesson scores in a course:

100%, 90%, 75%,

The course score is calculated using this formula:

(100 + 90 + 75)/3 = 88%

The alternate option calculates the course score as a percentage of the correct answers to the total number of questions in the course. This method is used when COURSE_SCORE_BY_LESSON_AVG is set to FALSE in the pageplayer.properties file. In this case, the course score is calculated by averaging all of the objective scores within the course using the following formula:

([L1 score * # of objectives / 100] + [L2 score * # of objectives / 100] + [L3 score * # of objectives / 100] + [L4 score * # of objectives / 100])/ total # of objectives in the course = course score

If the learner scored the same lesson scores for this course, but the SCP used this scoring method and the lessons had the following number of objectives, respectively: 4, 5, 8

The course score would be the following:

([75 x 4/ 100] + [90 x 5/ 100] + [75 x 8/ 100] / 17 = 13.5/17 = 79%

Calculating Lesson and Topic Scores

Topic and lesson scores are calculated by averaging all the objective scores within a particular Topic or lesson. Continuing with the example, the learner scored 80% in the Risk Management Plan Topic. This score is the average of the individual Objective scores within that topic. In the example, each Topic has only one Objective score, so that number represents the Topic score.

The lesson score for Inputs to Quantitative Risk Analysis is calculated using the formula:

([T1 score * # of objectives] + [T2 score * # of objectives] + [T3 score * # of objectives] + [T4 score * # of objectives])/ total # of objectives in the lesson = lesson score

(75 * 1)+(80 * 1)+ (25 * 1)+ (90 * 1)+ (100* 1) /5 = 74%

The only way to see the raw Objective score data is by examining the contents of the Java console while results are being posted to the LMS. The SCP must be running with LMS Debug mode enabled (DEBUG = TRUE in and LMS_DEBUG = TRUE in pageplayer.properties). Below is an excerpt from the Java console showing lesson and topic scores:

From this data, we can determine that there were five objectives in lesson one, and each topic has one objective (topics and objectives are always numbered starting from zero).

Partial Credit Scoring

When Partial Credit (PC) is enabled (PARTIAL_CREDIT=TRUE in the pageplayer.properties file for Business Skills; e3 and CCA courses score this way by default) each question can be scored 0-100%. Partial Credit only affects multi-part questions, or single-part questions with more than two selectable answer choices (e.g., matching, case studies, etc.). The Partial Credit is dependent on how many answer choices there are. For example, a question with five choices would have possible scores in increments of 20% (0, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100). A question with three choices would have possible scores of 0, 33, 67, 100.

Note: You can still toggle on PARTIAL_CREDIT for Business Skills content when USE_CCA_COMPLETION_MODEL_FOR_LEGACY is set to TRUE

Multiple-choice question examples

A multiple-choice question with five choices, four of which are correct. User selected answers as follows:

PC score for this item is 80% (20% for each correct choice selected, plus 20% for the incorrect choice not selected).

A multiple-choice question with four choices, three of which are correct. User selected answers as follows:

PC score for this item is 75% (25% for each correct choice selected, plus 25% for the incorrect choice not selected).

A multiple-choice question with five choices, two of which are correct. User selected answers as follows:

PC score for this item is 80% (20% for each correct choice selected, plus 20% for each incorrect choice not selected).

Case Study Question Example

A Case Study has three questions associated with it. Each of the questions is scored individually using partial credit scoring. The question scores are averaged to get the partial credit score for the overall case study. Assume the user answered the case study questions as follows:

Question 1: 33%

Question 2: 100%

Question 3: 75%

PC score for the Case Study is: (33+100+75)/3 = 69

Lesson and Course Scores using Partial Credit

Assume the following objective scores:

lesson 1 has 3 objectives scored: 0, 50, 66

lesson 2 has 5 objectives scored: 100, 75, 50, 80, 33

lesson 3 has 5 objectives: 75, 0, 25, 100, 50

lesson 4 has 4 objectives: 20, 100, 25, 60

17 Objectives total

lesson 1 score is: (0+50+66)/3 = 38.66 - this value is rounded = 39

Following the same logic, the remaining scores are as follows:

lesson 1 = 39

lesson 2 = 68

lesson 3 = 50

lesson 4 = 51

Course Score is: [(39*3)/100 + (68*5)/100 + (50*5)/100 + (51*4) /100] /17 = (1.17 + 3.4 + 2.5 + 2.04)/17 = .5358 = 54%

Exiting a Test Early

When exiting a Business Skills test early, any scores earned within the topic are not saved.

Completion Logic

The SCP has several methods for determining course completion. By default, the course is marked as Complete when all of the content has been “touched” or “mastered” (excluding the Course Overview, which is not required). Looking at the course menu, a topic is considered touched if the status column has a full circle . A topic is considered mastered if the associated topic score is 100%. Therefore, all topics must be marked with a full circle in the status column, or a score of 100%.

You can configure the SCP with a completion threshold by setting an integer value for LMS_COMPLETION_THRESHOLD in the pageplayer.properties file.  When a completion threshold is specified, the user’s course score must meet or exceed the specified value in order for the course to be marked as complete.  When this option is used, the SCP does not use touched content when determining course completion.