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.
WeBWorK Problems
greater than and less than signs converted to their html code
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