"Can always show old answers by default" controls whether the student's previous answers to a question are pre-filled in the answer blanks when they return to the question.
I believe the permission you are looking for is "Allowed to view past answers", which is set on the same page in Course Configuration.
The default for "Can always show old answers by default" is student which you should probably keep unless you want to force students to do a lot of repeat work on multipart quaetions.
All default values are still set, and the feature used to work. I'm trying to discover approximately when it stopped (which might indicate why). The person who informed me of the problem just returned from sabbatical, so it might have been anytime in the past year or so.
Hi Brett,
Does this happen in all courses or just one or a few courses? Defaults are set for the whole system in defaults.config which is overridden by anything in localOverrides.conf. Next anything on course.conf overrides defaults for a single course and finally anything set on the Course Management page overrides everything else. So there are quite a few places to check for defaults. Most likely someone changed something at some point.
Arnie
It appears to be happening everywhere. The contents of simple.conf in the current course I am troubleshooting are:
#!perl
# This file is automatically generated by WeBWorK's web-based
# configuration module. Do not make changes directly to this
# file. It will be overwritten the next time configuration
# changes are saved.
$permissionLevels{view_answers} = 'professor';
simple.conf should override everything else, but it doesn't seem to be working. But, as I've been poking around, I've also realized that I'm still on 2.5.0 (!), so I'll probably drop this issue until after I've been able to upgrade to 2.8
I think there was a version of WW around 2.5 that didn't include the Show Past Answers functionality (someone removed it without realizing, I think). So I suspect updating will fix the problem.