Assignment Access Restrictions

Sets (both homework and gateway/quiz assignments) may be configured to restrict access to students working on computers with specific IP addresses, or to deny access to specific addresses. This is accomplished in two steps. First, a location (or locations) is (are) defined through the Course Administration course: for example, the locations defined could be "EH-B069" for a computer lab in East Hall, room B069, or "Proctored Gateway Lab", for the lab in which proctored tests are administered. Second, the set is changed by editing it to restrict access by location.

To define locations, the WeBWorK administrator selects "Manage Locations" in the Admin Course. This allows her or him to add, edit, and delete locations. Each location can have any number of IP addresses associated with it, either specified individually (e.g., as 192.168.15.101), as a range of values (e.g., 192.168.15.101-192.168.15.125), or by an IP mask (e.g., 192.168.15.0/24). Note that these locations must be given as numerical IP addresses.

Once locations are defined, a WeBWorK professor can edit her/his sets to restrict access by location. To do this s/he selects "Restrict To" or "Deny From" from the "Restrict Access by IP" option when editing the set. After saving this change, a list of the available locations appears, from which s/he can select the desired restrictions (and then, of course, save the set again to save the changes).

Note that if no locations are defined, the "Restrict Access by IP" option is unavailable to professors. In addition, note that the view_ip_restricted_sets entry in the permissionLevels hash defined in the global.conf file determines whether a user can view a set from a computer which would otherwise be denied access to it. The default setting allows TAs and professors to ignore these restrictions.

Finally, it is possible to relax the IP address restrictions by setting a value for "Relax IP restrictions when?". Possible values are "Never," "After set answer date," (that is, after answers come available for the set, or, for GatewayQuiz assignments, after they come available for the template set (c.f., due and answer dates for GatewayQuiz assignments), or "After version answer date." "After version answer date" makes answers available after the answer date for a specific set version (as described in due and answer dates) of a GatewayQuiz assignment, which may in general be before the answer date of the template set. "After version answer date" and "After set answer date" are regarded as the same thing for regular homework assignments.