Exam and certificate: how competence is verified, and why an AI assessment never makes a certificate

In brief

In CoreSkills competence is verified in two stages that are deliberately kept apart. A course records a skill when its last step is done; a certifying path's exam opens when every required skill is recorded. The exam is a deterministic multiple-choice exam whose every question a person has approved, and the certificate rests on it alone. The AI teacher, practice and the skills-mapping interview are for learning, and they do not affect the certificate. A certificate is valid for twelve months, and it can be checked by its identifier on a public page.

A skill is recorded from a course

A learning path is a set of skills and a required level, from one to four, for each. Skills accrue from courses: when a course's last step is done, the skill is recorded at the level the course teaches. The value never falls, and no setting the learner makes writes it.

Courses at levels 3 and 4 contain an assignment, and it is done when the answer has been handed in. No reviewer's approval has to be waited for. That is a conscious choice: levels 3 and 4 mean that a person is responsible for the matter and guides others, or resolves edge cases, and such a level is not recorded for a click, but a slow reviewer, or an organisation with none, must not strand anyone in the middle of a path.

Only courses from the CoreSkills library count towards CoreSkills' learning paths. An organisation's own courses accrue to its own paths. That way a certificate means the same thing at every customer.

The exam

The exam opens when every skill the path requires has been recorded and the question bank holds at least twice the exam's size in approved questions in the exam's language. The exam is in the language the learner chose in settings, if the path is offered in it, and otherwise in the path's own language. If there are not enough questions, the exam does not open, and the page says so.

Every exam has the same shape: three parts, each with ten questions and six minutes. The parts can be taken on different days, and the clock starts when a part is opened. Answers are saved as they are given, and if time runs out, the part is graded from the saved answers. The exam is graded as a whole once all parts are done; an unanswered question counts as wrong. At a 75 per cent pass mark you need 23 correct answers out of 30, at 80 per cent 24. If the exam is not passed, it can be retaken at once.

Questions are drawn so that every skill of the path gets at least one. A responsible role's path requires more at a higher threshold and level, not a longer exam.

A question bank the course does not show

Exam questions are not a lesson's check questions. They are written into a separate bank per skill from the courses' text, and they are not shown during the course. Every question has been approved by a person, and the approver's name and time are recorded. AI may approve a question on its own gates for a skill that no certifying path requires, but the exam never asks such a question: the questions of a skill later taken into a path go through a person first.

A question cites a provision. When a new version of a statute arrives, the questions resting on the changed provision are flagged for review, and the exam does not ask them until a person has checked them. Questions in each language are written separately from the same material, not translated, and each language's questions are checked in that language.

The certificate and its verification

Once the exam is passed, the learner claims the certificate. It is not issued automatically: claiming is the learner's own act, and it requires the fulfilled requirements and a passed exam. The certificate is valid for twelve months from claiming. When fewer than 60 days remain, it shows as expiring, and it is renewed by retaking the exam; the new certificate replaces the old.

Every certificate has a readable identifier, for example CS-4KRT-9WQM-2FHD. Print opens the certificate as an A4 sheet with the identifier and the verification address. Verify opens a public page where anyone can check by the identifier whether the certificate is valid, to whom it was issued, for which path and when it expires. Certificates cannot be browsed or searched by name: the details show only for the identifier the holder has given out. A certificate nobody can verify would be decoration.

The employer sees certificates in the organisation's reports: who is certified, who is ready for the exam and whose certificate is expiring. That is covered in Training evidence for the regulator.

Why an AI assessment never makes a certificate

CoreSkills has an AI teacher with whom a task can be gone through, a practice conversation for a course, and the skills-mapping interview. None of them records a skill or affects the exam or the certificate. This is a founding decision of the product, and it has two reasons.

The first is reliability. An AI's assessment can be gamed with AI: the same model that grades an answer can also write it. A certificate resting on an AI's assessment would tell a regulator not whether the person knows, but whether they can use a language model. A deterministic exam of questions a person approved tells what is asked.

The second is the AI Act. Its Annex III counts among high-risk uses AI systems used to evaluate the performance and behaviour of persons in a work-related relationship. Evaluating an employee's competence with AI and issuing a certificate on it would be exactly that, and it would bring the employer the obligations of a deployer of a high-risk system. CoreSkills does not do it: AI teaches and proposes, the person answers and decides, and the exam verifies.

The same line applies to self-assessment. In the skills-mapping interview the AI proposes levels, but only the person's own confirmation saves them, and they are saved as self-assessment, which steers recommendations but never a certificate.

A learning path without an exam

Not every path ends in an exam. A certifying path ends in an exam and a certificate; another path is complete when its courses are complete, and the completion shows in the training evidence. An organisation's own paths may be either. The difference is what the report says: a completion, or a certificate with its identifier.