I get infrequent but regular complaints from students that they completed an assignment, saw their score was 100%, but the next time they logged there was no record of it and their score was 0%. Student mendacity might be the simple solution, but I've seen enough cases in which the instructor was willing to vouch for the student's probity to doubt that is the complete answer.
Is it possible that in some rare cases, possibly involving a flaky network connection, that the scenario above could actually happen? Has anyone else encountered this?
Hi Andrew,
We, too, have occasional reports of this behavior. I've never seen a case in which an instructor thought that the student did the work as well. If the student gets the green bar of truth, the corresponding answer should already be recorded in the database, and therefore it shouldn't show up as a zero in the system.
The possible ways that this could happen (that I can think of) are: (1) The student worked homework set 2, thinking s/he was working homework set 1, and therefore ends up with a 0% on homework set 1; (2) The student worked on the set in office hours, and the instructor submitted the answer while acting as the student, so that it wasn't saved; (3) For us, we use the University's single sign-on webservice for WeBWorK. Therefore, if a student sits down at a computer where someone else in the course was working and that person didn't log out, the student will complete work as the other person, possibly without noticing.
I've never been able to come up with a situation that makes sense in which the student's work was not recorded but they actually did it.
Gavin
We, too, have occasional reports of this behavior. I've never seen a case in which an instructor thought that the student did the work as well. If the student gets the green bar of truth, the corresponding answer should already be recorded in the database, and therefore it shouldn't show up as a zero in the system.
The possible ways that this could happen (that I can think of) are: (1) The student worked homework set 2, thinking s/he was working homework set 1, and therefore ends up with a 0% on homework set 1; (2) The student worked on the set in office hours, and the instructor submitted the answer while acting as the student, so that it wasn't saved; (3) For us, we use the University's single sign-on webservice for WeBWorK. Therefore, if a student sits down at a computer where someone else in the course was working and that person didn't log out, the student will complete work as the other person, possibly without noticing.
I've never been able to come up with a situation that makes sense in which the student's work was not recorded but they actually did it.
Gavin
If you have guest access activated sometimes students login using guest access by mistake. Guest's answers are not permanently stored (and there are red warning signs to this effect that need to be ignored) but I've had that happen.
If it matters enough and you have access to webwork server you can look at access logs and the transaction logs to see if the student was active at the times they say they were. It would take some work using grep and other tools.
If it matters enough and you have access to webwork server you can look at access logs and the transaction logs to see if the student was active at the times they say they were. It would take some work using grep and other tools.
In addition to Gavin's possibilities, I've also seen a cached version of the homework set's page show up, which would have been from the last time the browser viewed the page, probably when they had not answered any questions yet. Forced-reloading the page would produce the correct version.
A similar issue could be if the student used "back" to get back to the homework sets page (or opened the first problem in a new tab and then closed that tab). They would get back to the version of the page before they did any work. Again, force-reloading the page should take care of it.
A similar issue could be if the student used "back" to get back to the homework sets page (or opened the first problem in a new tab and then closed that tab). They would get back to the version of the page before they did any work. Again, force-reloading the page should take care of it.
If you have server side access, and the student can narrow down the time period when they think they were submitting answers, and you are patient, you could examine the transaction logs. I say logs plural, because there is one for each course, and it may be that the student was not even in the right course. If you wanted to try sleuthing, you could look here for anything coming from that student. Or anything coming from any student in the time period in question.
These logs are in /opt/webwork/webwork2/logs and have names like CourseName_transaction.log.
I'm not sure what the data blocks in these files really contain, but I do see what looks like student-typed answers among other things. Maybe this is a good time to ask Mike or anyone else following this what data these logs contain. Among other things, do they include a record of when "preview answer(s)" is pushed? In what ways do these logs differ from the answer logs within a course's file folder?
These logs are in /opt/webwork/webwork2/logs and have names like CourseName_transaction.log.
I'm not sure what the data blocks in these files really contain, but I do see what looks like student-typed answers among other things. Maybe this is a good time to ask Mike or anyone else following this what data these logs contain. Among other things, do they include a record of when "preview answer(s)" is pushed? In what ways do these logs differ from the answer logs within a course's file folder?
When I receive complaints like this, it is usually because the student is in a situation where their attempts are not being recorded: either the due date has passed or they have used up all of their attempts.
In the two situations above, students will still receive the green bar, but in it there is a message saying that their score on the question was not recorded.
The scores shown on the homework set page or the Grades page are taken directly from the database. I've never had a situation where those grades mysteriously disappeared. The only situation where I could see that happening was if an instructor unassigned, then re-assigned a homework set.
Students can check one of the two mentioned pages for the assignment, and also make sure that they are logged in as the correct user (as shown in the top right corner). If this is changing, then something else is going on.
One other thought: if you are using an external authentication system, it might be possible that it has created more than one account for a student based on how they logged in, but you should immediately notice this when you look at the class list.