We have one course with one assignment where changing (increasing) "Max attempts" in the homework set editor where the sign says
"Any changes made below will be reflected in the set for ALL students."
does not actually work for all students, only for most of them.
For those students where the max attempt did not increase we can increase it one-by-one.
Unfortunately I cannot seem to reproduce the problem with any other assignments in the course.
I have not tested this nor looked at it for years, but in the past if you made changes for all students, it would not override prior changes for individual students. Could that be the case here?
It should probably say:
"Any changes made below will be reflected in the set for ALL students for which a student-specific version of that field is not set."
For the students where "max attempts" is not changing, is it possible they used an achievement item already to change their max attempts? Or an instructor/ta had already gone to manually boost their max attempts? These things would set a value in the database for that particular student that would still overrule the global version, even after the global version is changed. Without doing these things, that entry in the database is still null for the majority of students, and it falls back to the (changed) global value.
Thank you Arnie and Alex for the response.
I can confirm that for some students the "Max attempts" were checked the same way like when somebody changes for individual students the max attempts to be different from the class values.
There are no achievement items enabled in the class.
It was periodic re-randomization. Without periodic re-randomization even if students submit attempts, I can still increase their max attempts globally.
But if periodic re-randomization is enabled then the global max attempt does not increase for those students who just even looked at the question. And for those even turning off periodic re-randomization does not help, since they have individual max attempts marked in the database. Only individual changes work for them.
Got it. Thanks.