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student login trouble

student login trouble

by Hans Johnston -
Number of replies: 3
HI All,

In the last few days students are beginning to login to
WeBwork and some are having trouble. For two courses
now some students have no trouble logging in while others
do.

The initial password for each student is set to their student ID#.
FOr those who have trouble, going in as admin or the instructor,
by acting as them and then changing their password to EXACTLY
the same student ID# fixes the login problem.

Just wondering if anyone has had similar issues. Just to note,
we did upgrade to 2.4.7 in the past month and did not encounter
this issue previously.


Thanks, Hans
In reply to Hans Johnston

Re: student login trouble

by Bruce Yoshiwara -
We are using WeBWorK for remedial (intermediate algebra) students for the first time, and the students had lots of problems logging in.

However, I was always able to login myself using the student's default username and password, so I'm confident that our problem was with the students or our instructions, not with WeBWorK.
In reply to Hans Johnston

Re: student login trouble

by D. Brian Walton -
This is my first time with WeBWorK. I discovered that most students I helped with log-in problems were misunderstandings of the following type:

(1) They thought the student id number was their account name (confusion between username and password)
(2) They thought their full e-mail address was their account name (confusion between email address and e-mail name)
(3) They used capital letters on their account name when it was expecting all lowercase (confusion on case sensitivity)

My group was small enough that I had them come to my computer and show me their login process. No problems since then.

- D. Brian Walton
In reply to D. Brian Walton

Re: student login trouble

by Adam Weyhaupt -
I also recently had a problem and traced it to case sensitivity. Our new webwork system is interfaced with LDAP, I think. The other university systems (Blackboard, Webmail, etc.) use case-insensitive usernames, while the Webwork username is casesensitive. This particular student was accustomed to typing JSmith instead of jsmith.

Adam