Academy LMS

Evidence tier: Live bench plus official documentation plus wordpress.org directory metrics.

Identity and official links

WordPress.org directory: academy
Vendor site: academylms.net — the plugin header declares http://academylms.net, which redirects to the same host over HTTPS
Showcase subsite: wpqp.loca.zone/academy
Live benchmark: wpqp.loca.zone/academy/benchmark/
Core-Six measurement page: wpqp.loca.zone/academy/benchmark-core/
Signature demo: wpqp.loca.zone/academy/signature/
Native attempt surface: the benchmark course page, whose learn view runs the quiz at ?source=curriculums#/quiz/10
Pricing screen captured: Academy LMS → Get Pro (admin.php?page=academy-get-pro)

WordPress.org metrics (2026-08-19)

Captured 2026-08-19 from the wordpress.org plugin information API.

Metric	Value
Name	Academy LMS
Version	3.8.5
Active installs	2,000
Rating	98 / 100
Number of ratings	120
Last updated	2026-07-14
Tested up to	7.0.4
Requires PHP	7.4
Requires WordPress	6.8
Support threads / resolved	4 / 4

Pricing and source

The plugin is free from the WordPress.org directory, and quizzes ship inside that free package — but only as an add-on that must be switched on first. The paid tier is advertised from the plugin’s own Get Pro admin screen at $99 Individual / $129 Business per year, 1 site, presented as a launch offer against Normally $299 and $399. That is a promotional figure captured 2026-08-19, not a stable list price, and it is recorded as a vendor claim rather than a benchmarked cost. Five paid boundaries were observed live: the Fill In The Blanks [PRO] question type, the short-answer question type, the image-answer question type, the Public course type that would allow anonymous curriculum access, and the Grade Book add-on. No paid, nulled, or trial code was installed on the showcase bench. See the licensing and value notes for the showcase rule.

Live coverage summary: Standard Ten (Q1–Q10)

Question	Type	Status
Q1	Single-answer MCQ	ok
Q2	Single-answer MCQ	ok
Q3	Single-answer MCQ	ok
Q4	Single-answer MCQ	ok
Q5	Single-answer MCQ	ok
Q6	Single-answer MCQ	ok
Q7	Multiple-correct	ok
Q8	True / false	ok
Q9	Fill-in	pro-gated
Q10	Ordering	unsupported

Quizzes are invisible on a fresh install. Academy LMS → Add-ons → Course Features → Quizzes (“Enable or disable Quizzes for the courses on your eLearning site”) carries a live switch; flipping it returned the notice Quizzes successfully Activated and added the Academy LMS → Quizzes submenu. The paid cards on that same screen render disabled behind an academy-icon--lock.

A quiz then exists only inside a course curriculum, authored through a three-step tabbed modal: 1 Quiz Info, 2 Questions, 3 Settings. The complete free Question Type list is True/False, Single Choice, Multiple Choice, Short Answer [PRO], Image Answer [PRO], Fill In The Blanks [PRO]. The last three carry aria-disabled="true", so Q9 is pro-gated — the only text-answer types are both locked — while Q10 is unsupported for a blunter reason: those six options are the entire list, so no ordering, sorting, or matching type exists in the free or paid dropdown at all.

Q1–Q8 were authored verbatim from the benchmark quiz source, each with its explanation typed into the per-question Explanation (Optional) field: Q1–Q6 as Single Choice, Q7 as Multiple Choice with both Argon and Neon ticked, Q8 as True/False. Correct answers were confirmed in the database as is_correct=1 on exactly the source values.

completionPass is false. An authenticated attempt did complete: the learn page reported Questions: 8, Passing Grade: (80%), and submitting the correct answers returned Passed, Earned: 8.00/8.00, Percentage: 100%, 8 CORRECT, 0 INCORRECT. The Core Six quiz behaved identically with Earned: 6.00/6.00. A logged-out visitor cannot reach either: the Course Type control offers Free, Paid, and Public, and Public — the only type that exposes curriculum content without enrolment — is a disabled radio wearing an academy-pro-badge reading PRO. An anonymous fetch of the course page returns the enrol control as <button class="academy-btn academy-btn--bg-purple academy-btn-popup-login">Enroll Now</button>, wired to a login popup rather than to enrolment, and Academy’s own admin notice confirms why nobody can self-register: Membership option is turned off, students and instructors will not be able to sign up. No anonymous score was fabricated; Academy is recorded among the blocked products in the end-to-end verification record.

The free tier also caps attempts: after one submission the learn page shows Total Attempted: 1/1 and withdraws Start Quiz for that user, even though the quiz meta default is academy_quiz_max_attempts_allowed = 10. The free 3 Settings step exposes no attempts control, so re-verification requires a different account.

For the full cross-plugin matrix, see the capability matrix and the comparison index.

Runtime measurements

Captured 2026-08-19 on the Core-Six page, Chromium with cache disabled, logged-out, networkidle2.

Metric	Value
URL	`https://wpqp.loca.zone/academy/benchmark-core/`
Total requests	42
JS files / bytes	34 / 704,687
CSS files / bytes	3 / 39,601
Total transfer	949,765 bytes
jQuery loaded	no
DOM nodes	215
WordPress / PHP	7.0.4 / 8.3.33

Academy LMS registers no quiz shortcode, so this measured page is not a rendered quiz. A grep of the plugin’s shortcode directory returns course, curriculum, enroll, dashboard, login, and search shortcodes only. The Core-Six page therefore carries Academy’s course-card shortcode plus the native learn-page link, and the quiz itself runs on the course learn page. The number above is the weight of Academy’s course UI, which is the smallest surface the plugin will render for a visitor who is about to take a quiz — comparable across the roster in kind, not in composition. The four expansion rows were captured against WordPress 7.0.4, which the container reached through core auto-updates after the pinned 7.0.2 image was provisioned; plugin versions stayed pinned throughout. See the runtime weight comparison for the full table.

Signature-feature walkthrough

The Academy subsite demonstrates three free-tier capabilities:

Course-embedded quiz with a tabbed builder — the course Physical Sciences Standard Ten holds the curriculum topic Standard Ten Benchmark Topic, and inside it the quiz Standard Ten Science Benchmark was saved through 1 Quiz Info → 2 Questions → 3 Settings. The settings step turned on Show Question Explanations, set Quiz Questions Layout to All and Questions Order to Ascending (the free default is Random), left Time Limit at 0, and set Passing Grade (%) to 80 with Quiz Feedback Mode at Default. Enrolling from the native course page produced You have been enrolled on August 19, 2026 and swapped the buttons to Start Course / Complete Course.
Multiple-correct and true/false without paying — unusual among the roster’s LMS engines, both extensions are free here. Q7 is a Multiple Choice question with two ticked correct options, and Q8 is a pre-seeded True/False pair. Both were graded correctly in the live attempt.
Local ownership surfaces — Academy LMS → Tools ships an Export/Import tab, and Settings ships Payments, Brand & Style, Form Builder, and Custom Fields tabs. Their presence was observed in the free admin; no export, payment gateway, or branding change was exercised on the bench.

The signature page presents both benchmark courses through [academy_courses ids="11,13"] alongside the learn-page link, because the course card is the only plugin-native way to advertise a quiz on an ordinary page.

Coexistence

Academy LMS activated cleanly on its own subsite and on the coexistence lab alongside thirteen other roster plugins, including two rival LMS engines, Tutor LMS and Sensei LMS. It contributed one top-level admin menu item, Academy LMS. No fatal, no page error, and no new debug.log line was attributed to Academy, so the pre-decided LMS fallback ladder was never needed and no setting change was applied to make it coexist. Its Membership option is turned off, students and instructors will not be able to sign up. notice is a configuration hint, not an error.

Catches

Quizzes are absent from a fresh install until the bundled add-on is enabled; an operator who never visits Add-ons will conclude the plugin has no quiz feature.
There is no standalone quiz. Every quiz needs a course and a curriculum topic above it, and the plugin registers no quiz shortcode, so pages can only link to the native learn view.
Q9 needs a paid question type and Q10 has no implementation at any tier: the six-entry Question Type list contains nothing that orders, sorts, or matches.
No anonymous attempt is possible on the free tier. Public course access is PRO-locked and the logged-out enrol button is a login popup, which is why completionPass is false despite a clean authenticated pass.
The free tier silently caps a learner at one attempt (Total Attempted: 1/1) while the underlying quiz meta default is 10, and the free settings step offers no control to change it.
Observed defect: [academy_enroll_form course_id="13" layout="modern"] renders Academy’s Free / Enroll Now widget on an ordinary page, but clicking Enroll Now there returns HTTP 400 and the widget text becomes Failed To Enroll Course. Reproduced twice, with no enrolment row written. Enrolment works only from the native single-course template, so the shortcode was removed from all three demo pages.
The advertised Pro price is a promotional launch offer measured against a much higher “normal” figure, so total cost of ownership cannot be read off the screen with confidence.
At 2,000 active installs Academy is one of the smallest roster deployments, which costs it the install sub-score even though update recency, rating, support resolution, and tested compatibility are all maximal.

Audit score

Using the rubric weights, with the four 2026-08-19 additions scored mechanically from free-tier live observation as the rubric’s expansion note records:

Category	Score
Depth	8 / 10
Author / learner UX	8 / 10
Logic / results / reporting	6 / 10
Maintenance / trust	8.76 / 10
Integrations / data ownership	8 / 10
Value	8 / 10
Weighted total	77.14 / 100

Maintenance sub-scores: update recency 10, active installs 4, rating 9.8, support resolution 10, tested compatibility 10.

That total ranks Academy LMS sixth of the fourteen scored plugins. Because the original ten rows keep their 2026-08-03 documentation-tier category judgments, small gaps across the two cohorts reflect scoring method rather than merit; read the coverage row and completionPass before the total.

Verdict

Academy LMS is a genuine course platform that happens to score better on question breadth than most quiz-first plugins: multiple-correct and true/false both work in the free tier, grading is exact, and the result screen reports marks, percentage, and pass state without an add-on. The cost is that its quiz is a members-only artefact. Nothing anonymous can be attempted, one attempt per learner is all the free tier allows, text entry and ordering are out of reach, and the enrol shortcode is broken outside the course template. Choose it when the audience is already logged in and the quiz belongs to a lesson; choose a quiz-first engine from the roster when the quiz has to greet a stranger on a landing page.

Visual evidence

Captured 2026-08-19 in desktop Chromium at 960 px content width. Each crop removes browser chrome and unrelated page furniture while retaining the complete visible plugin surface.

WP Quiz Showcase

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