Additional Challenge Levels
As the Cooperative Care Certificate Program grows and evolves we will focus on developing new and interesting challenges for you and your canine training partner. The additional levels of “Plus” and “Honors” will be available as additions for each of the existing basic levels.
Our goal is to increase challenges and encourage trainers to work towards higher levels of complexity and difficulty with these exercises. We believe that these requirements more closely approximate real life examinations and procedures.
The two criteria we will be increasing are duration and accuracy/fluency.
For duration at the Plus level you will be expected to divide the exercises into two sections. The first section will contain Exercises 1-5 in order as a continuous chain. The second section will contain Exercises 6-10 in order as a continuous chain. For duration at the Honors level you will be expected to submit one continuous video of all 10 exercises in order. Please note that you are free to use reinforcers as you desire throughout the submission.
For accuracy at the Plus level you may earn a “not yet” for two exercises (8/10 passing). For accuracy at the Honors level you may earn one “not yet” for the entire submission (9/10 passing). In addition, the requirement to chain the exercises together means that those exercises will need to be more practiced and fluent to be performed well on the first attempt.
You must earn the basic certificate at each level first. Then, you can choose to do the Plus level and then the Honors level. Or, you can move directly to the Honors level and skip the Plus level altogether. For both Plus and Honors levels you MUST attempt all the exercises, no skipping.