Hi Eddie and Mike,
The error that you're seeing when trying to access a gateway/quiz comes
from the way that we're distinguishing what ContentGenerator should be
used for what assignment. I believe all ContentGenerator selection in
WeBWorK is done by URL (Mike or Sam can correct me if I'm wrong about
this), which is in general not an issue but behaves slightly
differently for gateway/quiz sets. To obtain access to a gateway/quiz
set the URL needs to be <http://[serverName]/webwork2/courses/[courseName]/quiz_mode/[testName]/> .
Getting the correct URL for each type of assignment is dealt with when
navigating to assignments within WeBWorK (I think). For proctored
gateway/quizzes, change "quiz_mode" to "proctored_quiz_mode".
This subtlety arises because a given problem could be part of a
homework set (for which access should be through Problem
ContentGenerator) or a gateway/quiz (for which access should be through
the GatewayQuiz ContentGenerator). In particular, we want to be sure
that someone isn't getting a sneak peak at their gateway/quiz problems
by hacking the URL and using the Problem ContentGenerator.
It may be that in the long run we may want to try and make this more transparent, so that a URL <http:://[serverName]/webwork2/courses/[courseName]/[quizName]>
would work. But that's something I'll serve out for others to comment
on; it would require recasting the URLPath map to also use information
from the database.
Considering your other questions: (2) Proctoring large
classes: This is a question that has come up. The gateway/quiz module
was written thinking about the case where students are coming into a
proctored lab on a rolling basis. Then before any student takes a test
a proctor walks up, verifies the student's ID, etc. This is the case we
deal with, and appears to work well for us with a testing lab of about
30 computers and 2-3 proctors (we have up to 1800 students taking
proctored tests at any one time; at the top end of that we sometimes
have to open an additional lab). In the case where an entire class is
taking a test, or it's being administered to large groups, this may
obviously be a little cumbersome, and I would be inclined to use one of
two possible work arounds. The first, if it's important that the
students not begin the test until a specific start time, would be to
have some generic proctor username/password set up ("proctor1" and
"taketest", for example), and then once all students' identities had
been checked to the satisfaction of the proctors to announce that so
that they can type it in themselves. The second would be to just have
the test not be a proctored test, but have it open only at the time
that students are to take it. This does require that the IP number of
the students' computers be checked against a known list, however.
(3) The question of an IP address/subnet restriction has also come
up. I'll leave the addition of this to WeBWorK as a academic discussion
point. I've been managing it a the server level, restricting addresses
as needed.
I hope this is helpful,
Gavin
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