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Dropped connections during Gateway Quiz

Dropped connections during Gateway Quiz

by Andrew Dabrowski -
Number of replies: 3

We recently had many problems with students taking a webwork exam (gateway/quiz) hitting the Preview button and finding their answers had disappeared.  Could this be due to a dropped connection?  Many students in the dorms are sharing the same wifi router, so it would not be surprising if connections were often dropped.

This experience has been so disconcerting that some are talking about switching to Edfinity, because presumably they have a modern web interface that records answers as they are entered.

In reply to Andrew Dabrowski

Re: Dropped connections during Gateway Quiz

by Alex Jordan -

We just had something that sounds similar happen with one student. Our distance learning staff reports:

> He has tried to take the quiz 6 or so times, he goes to complete the quiz and it doesn't submit the quiz for him, it logs him out.
> If he goes back into the quiz, any questions that he clicks a box to enter the answer will be retained, any question he has to type an answer in a box is gone.

They suggested he upgrade Chrome. He did that and then things worked for him. Unfortunately this all happened before we could establish the Chrome version he had been using.

So for what it's worth, one thing to look at is if students experiencing this have an up to date Chrome (or try a different browser). And if this is a general issue, and if we can understand it better, maybe WeBWorK can be adjusted to handle it better.

In reply to Alex Jordan

Re: Dropped connections during Gateway Quiz

by Nathan Wallach -
Debugging such an issue when the problem cannot be recreated might be difficult. Any intermittent problems is harder to debug and fix.

I would suggest:
  1. Proactive prevention - making sure to use a reasonably long timeout setting for the course.
  • Course Configuration -> General "tab" (should open) -> "Inactivity time before a user is required to login again" setting.
Consider whether this might be a "cookie" issue with the browser interfering with the WW cookie somehow. (Browser developer tools could help check that.)Considering whether the students are behind some sort of NAT (Network Address Translation) gateway which shares one IP address for many back-end users. Such a system can expire connection records more frequently than we would like and "break" connections, and some activity may be needed to keep the NAT record from expiring, or better yet - the student can try to connect using a network connection which does not use NAT.Checking to see if the student's IP number is changing when the issue occurs. (The login.log file seems to record the IP address.)If desperate and there is a technical possibility to look into it - try to get a network capture file from the students side + some time data from the user about when things worked/failed. That might help determine if this is a network issue.
In reply to Andrew Dabrowski

Re: Dropped connections during Gateway Quiz

by Alex Jordan -

Possibly, you experienced a version of this:

https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork2/issues/1208

The "good" news is that the transaction log for the course may still contain the student answers. You can access the transaction log in /opt/webwork/webwork2/logs/. It is helpful to apply grep or sed or something to throw out all lines except the ones wfor the student in question, for the quiz in question.

If there is any way to get hold of the browser console log from when this happens, that could be helpful. Or of course, if there is any reliable way to reproduce it.