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assignment mysteriously was unassigned to the students

assignment mysteriously was unassigned to the students

by Lou Taris -
Number of replies: 1
A professor here at Wheaton College is using Webwork and assigned a problem set to her students which she has done many times. She then received emails from a couple of her students indicating that they could not see the problems. When the professor went in to see what was going on, she discovered that the problem set she previously assigned, was only assigned to her. She then re-assigned it back to the entire class.

Has anybody seen this behavior before? Also, I changed the admin password associated with her class just in case a student figured out the admin password, hacked in, and unassigned the assignment.

Any known bugs with Webwork that could have done this?

Thanks!
In reply to Lou Taris

Re: assignment mysteriously was unassigned to the students

by Alex Jordan -
Is there solid evidence the students had ever been assigned the set in the first place?

It is natural that after creating a set from scratch, or importing a set and not selecting to assign it to everyone, that it would be assigned only to the instructor. For it to have been assigned to everyone at some point, but then later to only be assigned to the instructor, would be a very odd thing, and rather tedious to make happen even if you wanted it to happen.

If the instructor didn't select to assign to everyone when importing (or thought she did but the mouse slipped in the drop down selection) this would be the expected result. Or if the instructor created the set from scratch, and never completed assigning it to everyone, this also would be the expected behavior.

But if there is evidence that the students had previously been assigned the set, then there is something serious to investigate. Evidence could be in Email Instructor messages, something in the answer log (File Manager -> up from the templates folder -> into the log folder), or server-side logs of activity.