Comparable sets: candidates, exclusions, and the brief

The brief defines the decision

The Comparable set workbench begins with the offering you are planning. Its title and description establish the subject and audience. Credential form, delivery, contact hours, province, comparison geography, fee, currency, and audience make the boundary more explicit.

The brief can describe an unlaunched idea. CredScape analyzes that idea against indexed offerings without adding it to the index. Geography follows a deliberate ladder from one province to Canada, Canada and the United States, or anywhere. That rule is visible and repeatable.

Candidates are proposals, not final peers

The engine retrieves and reranks offerings, then admits candidates that clear its similarity and compatibility rules. Match labels show where each candidate agrees with the brief, including credential, market, audience, delivery, and provider kind. The workbench can show up to 20 qualified candidates in the set. Additional qualified offerings remain available in the export as past-cap evidence, but they are not included in the benchmark figures.

CredScape supplies the candidates and evidence. You decide which offerings are defensible peers. Every candidate begins included. Exclude one when a material difference makes it a poor substitute, and retain the reasoning behind that choice.

The saved set preserves the boundary

A saved comparable set records the brief, included and excluded candidates, and the benchmark snapshot. You can rename or delete your own set, share it with your organization, rerun it against current data, and export the evidence.

If nothing qualifies, nearest offerings can provide orientation but do not become comparables. If the engine cannot be reached, the page shows a separate unavailable state. That state prevents an outage from being read as a finding that no comparable offerings exist.