Telling L2 from L3
Two tests that settle most level disputes: who chose the approach, and what happens when the situation is not the one the procedure anticipated.
The boundary between Applied and Proficient is where most mapping disputes end up, and almost none of them are really about difficulty. A hard task performed by following someone else’s procedure is L2. An easy task where the person decided what the approach should be, and could defend that decision, is L3.
Test one: who chose the approach
At L2 the approach is given. Acceptance criteria exist and the person applies them; a test-case template exists and the person fills it; the escalation route is defined and the person uses it. Competence at this level is doing the work correctly and recording it so that someone else can see what was done.
At L3 the person produces the approach. They derive fitness criteria from the intended use rather than receiving them, they decide that a task needs human evaluation rather than model-graded evaluation, and they can say why. If you remove the procedure and the work still happens correctly, you are looking at L3.
Test two: what happens at the edge of the procedure
Give the candidate a case the procedure does not cover. An L2 response refers it, and refers it well: it identifies that the criteria do not reach this case and escalates rather than guessing. That is not a deficiency; it is the correct L2 behaviour and one of the indicators.
An L3 response resolves it, and records the reasoning so the resolution can be reviewed. The distinction is not confidence. A confident guess is worse at both levels.
Difficulty is not level
An earlier version of this note used a complex regression-testing example to illustrate L3. That was a poor example: the complexity came from the tooling, not from the judgement, and two respondents were right to say the example would push assessors towards testing tool familiarity. The example below replaces it.
A junior analyst running a two-hundred-case evaluation set overnight is doing a large amount of L2 work. A lead who looks at a proposed evaluation set and says it is unrepresentative of production, states which distribution it misses, and accepts the delay that fixing it causes, is doing a small amount of L3 work. Volume, tooling and hours are not the variable.
What this means for a coverage map
If a course teaches learners to apply criteria that the course itself supplies, map it at L2 and say so. Mapping it at L3 because the subject matter is advanced is the single most common error in the coverage maps that reach the Registrar, and it is the one that most damages a learner: they hold a credential asserting they can design an approach, and their first real task is to design one.
Where you genuinely cannot tell, map lower and state the uncertainty in the exclusions. An under-claimed map is a smaller problem than an over-claimed one, for you and for the person holding the credential.
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