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.
What is the best practice when entering merit badges earned in group settings such as Merit Badge Colleges and Summer Camps? The reports I receive from Council just have the Merit Badge marked as completed. There is no enumeration of the requirements completed except when the merit badge is incomplete.
Historically I have just been marking the merit badge complete in SB. However, the SM stated recently that he’s run into issues with doing that and he prefers to go through and check off all the requirements before marking the merit badge complete… Personally I have issues checking off requirements that I don’t know they completed.
If they don’t provide a list of completed requirements when the badge is complete, you’re out of luck. Maybe you can convince the council to provide more details going forward (mine always has).
@JasonParis It would be helpful to understand what kind of issues the Scoutmaster is running into. However, marking off individual requirements is not necessary except for partial completions.
Blue cards have been “designed” to either be marked complete or list completed requirements. One way you can tell this is there aren’t enough blanks for mark off each requirement for some MBs. Scoutbook follows that in a lot of ways in that you can mark complete without marking all of the individual requirements. Basically when the counselor says the Scout is done, all of the requirements are done.
I talked with the SM tonight and got some clarification. The issue was from Merit Badges marked as complete approximately 5 years ago. When the SM pulled a report in Internet Advancement for scout’s recent Eagle Board these Merit Badges didn’t show up.
@JasonParis That suggests a different issue, unrelated to whether individual requirements are marked off in Scoutbook or not.
If you could provide the Scout’s BSA member ID number, we could take a look. It might indicate that the Scout has a duplicate account somewhere.
Edited to add: Please keep in mind that items must be marked as Completed and Approved before they will show up on most reports (some reports will indicate that they need to be approved).
