Moodle SCORM activity not marked complete (passed, mastery score, "Require status")

Fix it

The cleanest fix changes both Moodle and the course. These are a standard Moodle's defaults; your site admin may have changed them.

1. In Moodle: accept Passed as well as Completed

   Ask your Moodle admin to open the SCORM activity's completion settings and, under Require status, tick both Passed and Completed. Either one then completes the activity.

2. In the course: make the two pass marks the same

   In Storyline, set the quiz pass mark on the result slide (Result Tools—Design → Quiz Settings → Passing Score) and report passed/failed: Publish → LMS / LRS → Reporting and Tracking, then on the LMS tab set “Report status to LMS as:” to “Passed/Failed”. Storyline writes the same pass mark into the manifest. In Rise or Captivate, set the quiz's passing score and pass/fail reporting the same way, then check the manifest's mastery score in Alder. More in mastery score vs quiz passing score.

3. Republish and check again

   Publish again, drop the new zip into Alder with Moodle picked, and repeat the test run. Then test one learner in Moodle.

If Moodle can't be changed

Report completed/incomplete instead: in Storyline, set “Report status to LMS as:” to “Completed/Incomplete”; in Rise, set “Report completion status as:” under Publish → LMS. But if the course also sends a score against a mastery score, Moodle still turns it into passed or failed, so ask the admin to set “Mastery score overrides status” to No for this activity.

Check the zip before you upload it again (free)

Moodle is one of the three LMSs whose notes are free in Alder, with SAP SuccessFactors and Workday Learning. Learners marked failed after passing? Check your course for this.

1. Drop the zip and pick Moodle

   Open Alder, drop the published zip (it is read in your browser; nothing is uploaded) and choose Moodle under “Uploading to”. If the course reports passed/failed, the findings say so straight away.

   

2. Take the quiz in the test player

   Click “Launch the course”, answer the quiz as a learner would, and click “I'm done”. If the manifest has a mastery score, the note now says what Moodle would record from your score, next to what the course set.

   

3. Compare with SCORM Cloud

   “What an LMS would record” shows SCORM Cloud's result, and Moodle's row under it is marked “differs” when the two disagree. With Moodle picked, the verdict at the top names Moodle too.

Moodle sources

These facts come from Moodle's SCORM code on GitHub, which is public: site settings (“Mastery score overrides status” defaults to Yes), activity form (new activities default to “Require status: Completed”) and SCORM 1.2 player. The edzlms article on incomplete SCORM courses describes the same two settings. Alder hasn't tested these on a real Moodle yet; its notes say “Based on documented reports”.

SCORM 2004. Both notes are about SCORM 1.2. Moodle's SCORM 2004 code appears not to judge passed or failed from the score, so a 2004 course's own success status is what Moodle keeps. We haven't confirmed that on a real Moodle yet.

Why it happens

1. “Passed” is not “Completed”. A SCORM 1.2 course reports one status: completed, incomplete, passed or failed. When you add a SCORM activity, Moodle's completion condition defaults to “Require status: Completed”, and it treats passed and completed as different values. So a course published to report passed/failed (the usual choice for a quiz) never completes the activity, even for learners who pass. A failed attempt never completes it either. SCORM Cloud counts passed as complete, which is why the course looked fine there.

2. The mastery score replaces the course's status. The mastery score is the pass mark written in the course's manifest (imsmanifest.xml). Moodle's “Mastery score overrides status” setting is on by default. When the course finishes with a score, Moodle compares it with the mastery score and records passed or failed, whatever the course said, even over “incomplete”. If the quiz passes at 80 and the mastery score is 90, a learner who scores 85 is told they passed and Moodle records failed. SCORM Cloud keeps the course's own status by default (we checked in September 2026), so it hides this.

3. The two together. A course that reports completed/incomplete gets past the first default, but if it sends a score and the manifest has a mastery score, Moodle turns “completed” into passed or failed at the end, and the default completion condition doesn't count either. A course that keeps learners “incomplete” so they can retry the quiz is recorded as “failed”.

Still not working?

• The course never sends “complete” at all, in any LMS: check it in the test player first; “What an LMS would record” shows SCORM Cloud's result.
• For the other LMSs Alder knows, see works in SCORM Cloud but not in your LMS.
• Learners lose their place: see the suspend_data limit.