We have some students who are doing quizzes involving inequalities, and when they submit and the page reloads, the < and > symbols in their answers have been turned into < and > (the codes for these symbols: & l t ; and & g t ; in case you are seeing them rendered as < and >). This has of course led to them being counted as incorrect.
This has only been observed in quizzes, but does not always happen. I am not able to reproduce the bug, although I can see that it happened for these students.
Is this a known issue? Does this have more to do with what browser/OS the student is using than WBWK? More to the point, does anyone have a suggestion for dealing with this?
In reply to Alex Jordan
Re: greater than and less than signs converted to their html code
by Gavin LaRose -
Hi Alex,
The only case where I've seen something like this was with < and > signs being removed by an HTML scrubber, which doesn't quite sound like what you're seeing (and occurred in homework). What WeBWorK and PG versions are you using, and what in which problem are you seeing this behavior?
Gavin
In reply to Gavin LaRose
Re: greater than and less than signs converted to their html code
by Paul Pearson -Hi Alex,
In the Course Configuration for WeBWorK, there is an "Inactivity time before a user is required to login again" setting. So, it is possible for a user to log in to WeBWorK and have their session time out. When a WeBWorK session times out, there is no visible change in the user's browser (some programs will actually switch the user to a "logged out" page if the session times out, but WeBWorK does not do that). So, students can enter answers and submit them on a session that has timed out. What I have noticed is that when students submit answers on a timed out session, certain characters in student's answers get converted to html code, such as < changing to < This has happened to me while editing pg files in the File Manager (which can be a real pain, since a lot of characters can be changed!).
I think I reported this bug a while ago, but it is possible that I was busy and forgot to submit it.
Best regards,
Paul Pearson
In reply to Alex Jordan
Re: greater than and less than signs converted to their html code
by Alex Jordan -
Ah, thanks Gavin and Paul!
Gavin, it is WBWK 2.8 and pg 2.8.1. It happened for all nine problems in a particular quiz that had inequality problems. Since the instructor has all nine problems on one page, I think it is quite likely that Paul has it, and that the students were spending over 30 minutes finding answers before hitting submit.
Paul, I have experienced the same thing while editing, and it is annoying. I copy the whole problem to a different editor where I can mass search-and-replace all of the special characters. But I had not associated this with logging out due to inactivity. I'll bump up the logout time for the course and hopefully that will fix this for now.
Gavin, it is WBWK 2.8 and pg 2.8.1. It happened for all nine problems in a particular quiz that had inequality problems. Since the instructor has all nine problems on one page, I think it is quite likely that Paul has it, and that the students were spending over 30 minutes finding answers before hitting submit.
Paul, I have experienced the same thing while editing, and it is annoying. I copy the whole problem to a different editor where I can mass search-and-replace all of the special characters. But I had not associated this with logging out due to inactivity. I'll bump up the logout time for the course and hopefully that will fix this for now.