Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
In Scoutbook, can electives be reassigned to a different rank after a rank is earned?
The Ordinary Rank requires 3 Level-1 (or higher) electives.
The Able Rank requires 4 Level-2 (or higher) electives.
The Quartermaster Rank requires 4 Level-3 electives.
My son used a Level-3 elective to earn Ordinary Rank.
If my son completes another Level-1 elective while working on Able, will that Level-1 replace the Level-3 from Ordinary, and bump it up to satisfy the Able requirement?
EDIT: Our advancement coordinator is OK with allowing this “reassigning of electives”, I’m just trying to determine if that is correct BSA policy and if scoutbook will allow it.
I’d hate to go forward with this, only to find out too late that this isn’t how it’s supposed to work.
I would recommend talking to your skipper about this. Generally, my experience has been that, once allocated to a rank, work done is not “reallocated” based on work done subsequent to earning that rank. That is independent of whether or not Scoutbook is being used.
For policy questions, BSA has specified that people be directed to their council to obtain answers. If the council can’t answer it based on their own knowledge, they have ways to push that information up to the national organization for clarification.
@Stephen_Hornak - it sounds like you’re saying that he cannot do this, but I don’t understand what you mean by “you can arbitrarily assign items.”
We just got a reply from the Sea Scout Program subcommittee chairman:
This has come up in the past and we formalized it into the Scoutbook programming in 2019 as follows.
The electives free flow so a Scout ends up with a total of
3 Level 1+ electives
4 Level 2+ electives
4 Level 3 electives
Earned in whichever order the Scout chooses as long as they meet the requirements for each rank.
No elective will be locked to a rank once earned.
While the group who originally wrote the requirements intended the electives to get more difficult as the Scout progressed though the program they all agreed that the order earned is ultimately benign and no Scout’s advancement should be negatively impacted because they chose a more rigorous elective first.
