How InterNACHI Calculates its Continuing Education Credit Hours

by Ben Gromicko, InterNACHI's Director of Education

  

Continuing Education is an integral aspect of InterNACHI's mission to help inspectors maintain excellence in the inspection industry, which is why we offer a comprehensive and broad array of online courses and video training. 

We sometimes receive inquiries about how we arrive at the number of credit hours we assign to our Continuing Education courses.  It is anything but random, and it's also not based only on how much time it takes the average student-inspector to complete the course.

Our method for calculating Continuing Education credit hours for all our courses was devised by us in concert with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, and the IRS, which uses the following word-count and course-content formula:

The word count for the text of the required reading is divided by 140, which is the average reading speed of adults reading technical content. The total number of review questions, exercises and final examination questions is multiplied by 1.85, which is the estimated average completion time per question. These two numbers, plus actual audio/video duration time, if any, are then added together, and the result is divided by 50 to calculate the CEUs for the self-study program. If the total minutes are not equally divisible by 50, the CEUs granted may be rounded down to the nearest one-half credit. 

For example, our Commercial Property Inspection Prerequisite (ComSOP) course includes 29,066 words and 111 quiz questions, which calculates as a total of 8.25 CE credit hours.  InterNACHI officially counts it as 8 CE credit hours. 

When we submit our courses to various states and agencies for approval and accreditation, a few of them may apply their own different standard for determining credit hours.  However, it is InterNACHI's policy, for the benefit of our members, not to adjust our courses' CE counts to anything lower than that arrived at using the approved formula above.

We value our members' time, and the expertise of our course authors, as well as the content of our courses, which is why we are diligent about applying a stringent methodology in determining the credit hours for our Continuing Education courses and video training. 

We also value our members' input on all our courses, which we strive to continually update with corrections and new information, as we become aware of them.  As always, we encourage our members to contact us with their feedback, either directly by emailing me at Ben@internachi.org, or through the individual course's dedicated forum on our Message Board, where student-members can communicate with the course author and other course students.