Yesterday we received an open letter from the community indicating concern about how roles were assigned for Flight Academy. The letter and follow up messaging highlighted examples of Discord accounts that a) received the Credit Practitioner and Credit Apprentice roles, and that b) certain members of the community did not think were deserving of those roles. There are a few points we wanted to share in response to this:

1. Everyone involved in scoring and running this process cares deeply about the quality of the community. We immensely appreciate community members flagging these issues to the team, and want to encourage the community to continue to support itself in this way going forward. Thank you! Above all, the most important thing is to work together to make the Goldfinch community world class.
2. Automated scoring requires trade offs. There were close to 200,000 activity completion submissions in Flight Academy (good work everyone!). Community managers and contributors have spent countless hours conducting checks to disqualify participants who were attempting to defraud the community through multi-accounts, plagiarism and other means. Due to the incredible volume of submissions, some checks had to be automated. Because automation was used, trade-offs had to be made between a) being too strict and disqualifying accounts of people who did a good job and b) being less strict and risking letting lower-quality work and a few multi-accounts pass. In general, we chose to lean more towards b) to maximize genuine high-quality participation in the community in the long run.
3. The two roles in question do not correlate directly with rewards or quality work. For this reason, we are removing these roles. There has been some confusion in the community about how the awards & Discord roles relate to GFI rewards. The Credit Apprentice and Credit Practitioner awards required only that certain minimum criteria have been met. In some cases, the quality of each message may not have been manually screened on account of extremely high volumes. Every participant who hit these minimum criteria were automatically awarded these roles. If, for example, the best credit analyst in the community accidentally didn't send messages for Module 2, then he/she was not eligible for either of these awards. He/she could still be eligible for significant GFI rewards, however. Participants with great performance also received these awards. Because the criteria for these two awards have so little to do with actual credit analytics skills or overall Flight Academy results, it's very unlikely that the community would ever find these roles to be useful. For this reason, we are going to simply remove these roles. We know this is likely disappointing for folks who actually earned the title, and we are sorry for that. All other awards have been manually reviewed by community management, and so we can be confident that they are well deserved. In the future, there will be other ways e.g. Backer staking that can be used to demonstrate your credit analytics skills to the community.
4. We are conducting one final check for multi-accounts and fraud based on our current list of rewards recipients. Community management will review one final time the list of participants who are eligible for NFTs and GFI rewards to screen for multi-account and other types of fraud. This will be based on some of the examples highlighted in the open letter as well as on additional checks and data points.
5. Within the next week, we will be announcing NFTs along with rewards tiers. As a part of the celebration of completing the Flight Academy, all general participants in the Academy who met certain basic criteria will be receiving NFTs. Around the same time the NFTs go live, we will also be sharing a list of metamask addresses and some additional info about the reward tier reached per address.