course_grade comes from any grading events where the object_id has 'course'
approving_state comes from only passed/failed events

so even outside of load xapi data, the pass/fail status doesn't necessarily line up with the grade (ie, there could be an earned event without a passed event)

To help with this, we will use the 'earned' events grade classification in combination with the passed/failed verbs

Passed/failed verb events do NOT have a score associated with them so there is still a possibility of a learner with 'passed' status and '0' score

Yeah, part of this issue is that what constitutes a passing grade is configurable per course (and so can change over time), so we count on the LMS to just tell us when a student is passing / failing.

If we use the grade_classification from the earned events, though, that should be accurate right?

Just to write down what we discussed, I think that's correct as long as we're only looking at the course level events.