Our exam integrity standards

Exam questions are delivered server-side and never exposed to the client before submission. Question order is randomised per attempt to prevent pattern-based guessing. Correct answers are never sent to the browser.

• Questions are fetched and evaluated entirely on the server.
• Question order is randomised on each exam attempt.
• Correct answers are never present in the page source or network response.
• Exams have a defined time limit enforced server-side.
• Learners receive up to three attempts per course — enough to retry, not enough to brute-force.
• A minimum score of 75% is required to pass.

Every certificate issued by Deliberate Academy carries a unique certificate ID. This ID is tied to a permanent, publicly accessible verification page that anyone can visit without creating an account.

• Each certificate has a globally unique ID generated at issuance.
• The public verification URL follows the format: https://deliberateacademy.com/verify/[certificate-id]
• Certificates are only issued when a genuine passing score is recorded in the database.
• Revoked or invalid certificates show a clear status on the verification page — they are never silently hidden.

Employers and clients can independently verify any Deliberate Academy certificate using the verification URL. No account is required.

The verification page displays:

• The full name of the certificate holder.
• The course title and certificate title.
• The date the certificate was issued.
• The current status — valid, revoked, or not found.
• The issuing organisation: Deliberate Academy.

Verification pages are permanent. A certificate that was valid when issued will remain verifiable at the same URL.

AI tools are allowed during the exam. Our courses teach applied AI skills, and we do not think looking something up — including asking an AI tool — should disqualify a learner any more than it would on the job. What we ask is that learners engage honestly with the material rather than relay exam questions to a chatbot and paste back the answer.

• Questions are delivered server-side and never exposed to the client. Correct answers are not present in the page source, the network response, or anywhere a scraper could find them.
• Question order is randomised per attempt.
• Short-answer questions are written to require course-specific reasoning rather than a generic definition a general-purpose AI model could produce from the question text alone.
• Multiple-choice questions are written around applied workplace scenarios rather than isolated definitions.
• A passing certificate means the learner cleared the server-graded exam threshold on that course — that is what the credential communicates to an employer today. We are continuing to invest in the underlying question banks so that threshold keeps getting harder to clear without doing the work.

Deliberate Academy certificates are designed to be used professionally — on LinkedIn, in proposals, and in hiring conversations. That means they need to be worth something.

• Every certificate represents a learner who completed a structured course and passed a real assessment — not someone who paid for a badge.
• We do not issue certificates for watching videos, completing quizzes with no time pressure, or paying a subscription fee — only for clearing a real, server-graded exam threshold.
• Where we find a weakness in how an exam is built or graded, we treat it as a defect to fix, not a feature to preserve for certificate volume. Our certificates are free, but they are not participation trophies.
• If we find evidence of systematic exam abuse, we reserve the right to revoke the affected certificates and record that status on the verification page.