Home / Categories / Courses & memberships
If I delete a student, do they lose their course progress?
Yes. Deleting a student erases their course progress right away, with no bin and no recovery window. If they get access to the course again later, they start over from the beginning.
What Delete actually does
Go to Assets, then Courses, then the Students tab. Find the student, open the three-dot menu next to their row, and choose Delete.
systeme.io's own article on this screen states the result in two short lines. Access: a deleted student immediately loses access to every enrolled course. Progress: deleting a student also permanently erases their course progress.
There is no bin for this and no waiting period. If that same person is added back as a student later, they start from the beginning. Nothing about their old progress comes back with them.
Delete is not the same as Dismiss
The Students screen has a second, gentler action, documented in a separate article. Dismiss revokes a student's access to a course but leaves them on your students list.
That article ends with its own pointer: to permanently remove a student from your list, read the article on removing a student, which is the Delete action covered above. The two are meant to be read as a pair, one reversible in spirit and one final.
What Dismiss does to a student's progress is not stated anywhere. Its own article only talks about losing access to course content, not about progress data. If there is any chance you will want that person back with their history intact, Dismiss is the documented way to hold the door open. Delete is documented to close it for good.
What this means for their contact record
A student and a contact are not the same screen, and no article says outright what deleting one does to the other.
The one documented connection runs the other way. When a contact is deleted from your CRM and still has access to a course or community, the bin shows no permanent deletion date at all. It reads Not applicable instead, because systeme.io will not finish deleting that contact while their course access stands.
So course access and a contact's deletion are linked in the system, at least in that one direction. Whether removing a student through the Courses screen also touches their separate contact record, or leaves it untouched in your CRM, is not documented either way.
The three actions, side by side
| Action | Where | What happens to progress | Can it be undone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dismiss | Student's file, Enrollments, three dots | Not documented | Not documented |
| Delete | Students tab, three dots | Permanently erased | No documented way back |
| Reset progress | Student's file, Enrollments, three dots | Wiped to zero | Yes, within a 1-month window through support |
Reset progress is covered on its own, since it is the one action that comes with a documented way to undo it.
How I checked this answer
Nothing on this site is written from memory. These are the sources I checked to write this answer, and the date I checked them.
- How to remove a studenthelp.systeme.io, article 2122
- How to revoke a student's access to a coursehelp.systeme.io, article 274
- How to restore deleted contactshelp.systeme.io, article 11332
Checked on
Did this answer your question?
Keep reading
- Why can't my students see the lecture I just added? It saved as a draft. The three places that need activating before a student can see anything.
- Can I change the email students get when they join my course? No. Every enrollment route fires the same fixed template, and there is no setting to change it.
- Why isn't my reCAPTCHA showing up on my form? One cause is a missing element. The other is two settings pointing at different domains.