Mastery score vs quiz passing score: why your LMS records the wrong result

A SCORM course carries two pass marks: the passing score of the quiz inside the course, and the mastery score in the course's manifest, which the LMS reads. When the two differ, a learner can see “You passed” in the course while the LMS records “failed”, or the other way round.

Where each number lives

• The quiz passing score is set in your authoring tool. In Storyline it is on the quiz's Results slide. The course uses it to decide what to tell the learner and which status to send to the LMS.
• The mastery score is in imsmanifest.xml, the file that tells the LMS how to launch the course. In SCORM 1.2 it is <adlcp:masteryscore>, from 0 to 100. In SCORM 2004 it is <imsss:minNormalizedMeasure>, from 0 to 1, so 80% is written 0.8.

What the LMS does with the mastery score

SCORM 1.2. The standard lets an LMS decide passed or failed by comparing the score the course reports with the mastery score. SCORM Cloud does this only when the course never sets a status itself: its “Mastery Score Overrides Lesson Status” setting is off by default (we checked in September 2026). Stricter LMSs re-judge every attempt. So a mismatch can look fine in SCORM Cloud and still go wrong in your LMS.

SCORM 2004. The LMS must judge passed or failed by comparing the scaled score with the mastery score, whatever the course says. SCORM Cloud does exactly that, so a mismatch shows up there too.

An example

The quiz passing score is 80 and the mastery score is 90. A learner scores 85. The course tells them they passed, but an LMS that applies the mastery score records failed. Anyone scoring between 80 and 90 gets the wrong result, and the LMS report no longer matches what learners saw.

Two related problems

• A quiz-tracked course with no mastery score. Pass or fail then rests entirely on the status the course sends. LMS reports that show mastery have nothing to compare with, so the same attempt can show as passed in one LMS and completed or unknown in another.
• A mastery score on a course that never reports a score, for example one tracked by slides viewed. An LMS that applies the mastery score can record “failed”, or never “passed”, for a learner who viewed everything.

How to check your course with Alder

1. Open Alder and drop the published zip. It is read in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
2. Read the findings. A mismatch is a blocker, MANIFEST-007, which names both numbers and the file each came from. MANIFEST-006 flags a quiz-tracked course with no mastery score, and TOOL-004 a mastery score on a course that reports no score.
3. To see it happen, launch the course in the test player, score between the two numbers, and click “I'm done”. “What an LMS would record” shows the result, and for SCORM 1.2 you can switch the LMS behavior to “Strict SCORM 1.2” to see what a stricter LMS records.

How to fix it

Make the two numbers the same. In Storyline, set the passing score on the quiz's Results slide, check that Publish → LMS/LRS → Reporting and Tracking uses “Track using quiz result” with that Results slide, and publish again: Storyline writes the same number into the manifest. Avoid editing imsmanifest.xml by hand unless the published manifest still has no mastery score at all.