Grading a lesson, and how it is recorded
How an instructor grades a lesson against the syllabus, the competency scales, and how the grade is signed, recorded and reflected in a student's progress.
Last reviewed
Grading is how a training flight becomes part of a student's record. The instructor assesses what the student did against the exercises the lesson covered, and that assessment feeds the student's progress automatically, rather than living in a paper folder someone reconciles later.
Grading is against the syllabus
A booking for a training flight carries the lesson it is for, and the lesson maps to the exercises in the syllabus. So when you grade, you are not writing free text into a box, you are assessing performance against the specific exercises the flight covered. See The difference between an exercise and a lesson.
Crucially, the grade is recorded against the version of the syllabus the student is enrolled on. If the course is later re-versioned, a student already enrolled keeps being graded on the version they started under, so a syllabus change never rewrites what someone was signed off against.
The grading scales
FlyerOS uses competency-based grading, and the scale is yours to configure. It is framework-agnostic, so a school can align it to the EASA or ICAO competency framework it works to, or use its own. A typical scale runs from "introduced" through "practised" to "competent", but the point is that it is a defined scale applied consistently, not one instructor's shorthand that the next instructor has to interpret.
It happens at close-out
Grading is part of closing a training flight out, not a separate job that gets forgotten. Because the flight already knows its lesson and its enrolment, the training record is drawn up from what was actually flown, and the instructor grades against the right exercises for the right student on the right syllabus version. See Closing out a flight.
Signed, and never quietly changed
A grade is signed by an identified instructor and bound to the record. If a grade is later amended, the change is appended, carrying who made it, when and why, and the original stands beside the correction. Nothing is overwritten, so the history of an assessment is intact and an inspector sees both the original and any amendment.
What the grade feeds
Because progress is computed from the grades rather than from memory:
- The student's position against the syllabus updates as they fly.
- Students falling behind the expected pace are surfaced early, so a CFI or head of training can act before it becomes a problem.
- Exam and skill-test recommendations rest on a record that is a fact, not a reconstruction.