When a user selects an assessment in the LMS, a launch page appears. Depending on the previous completion status of the assessment, the launch page allows the user to start the assessment, to continue an incomplete assessment, or to retake a previously completed assessment. If a user continues an assessment that was left incomplete, only the remaining questions are presented. Questions that were previously answered maintain their previous answer values. The assessment itself does not begin until the user clicks the Start (Continue/Retake) button on the launch page. Therefore, until the assessment is launched, no change in completion status takes place. If the user navigates away from the assessment without launching it, no attempt at the assessment has been made.
Once the assessment is launched, its completion status is set to "incomplete". If the user navigates away from the assessment before completing it, the assessment remains incomplete and the exit state is set to "suspend". The user can later come back to the assessment, answer the remaining questions, and complete the assessment.
Since assessments are graded, a completed assessment is never actually be set to "completed", but rather to "passed" or "failed". Note that SCORM 2004 separates completion status from success status, and so under SCORM 2004 the completion status for the assessment is set to "completed", with its success status set to "passed" or "failed".
If a user retakes a previously completed assessment, the completion status and score of the new attempt is reported back to the LMS. If the user previously passed the assessment but failed it on retaking it, a failed status and score is sent to the LMS. It is up to the LMS implementation whether it shows the last attempt (failed) or the best attempt (passed) in the user interface.
Note: The SCORM 1.2 specification does not allow "not attempted" to be sent to the LMS, only for it to be received from the LMS. It also specifies that if no completion status is sent to the LMS, then "not attempted" is automatically changed to "incomplete". Therefore, if the user navigates away from an assessment prior to launching it, on a SCORM 1.2 LMS the completion status is set to "incomplete".
The order of question presentation, answer presentation, and required score for passing are all controlled by properties set in the Developer. These are not controlled by settings in the LMS itself.