Webwork does not auto-save entered answers.When students experience an internet hiccup, they get disconnected, and many of their answers are lost upon reconnection.Students are told in online courses that use Webwork testing to press preview frequently, which saves their answers, but some forget to do that.Is there an option to enable autosaving the answers?Like whenever a student chooses an answer for a question or changes his answer to the question,it has to be saved.So that even if they get disconnected and login again,those answers should be synced again.
At this point there is no autosave. I recommend that you design your Gateway quizzes differently to accommodate this issue. Instead of having a large number of problems on one page, have a smaller number of problems per page. In fact, I recommend one problem per page. If a student changes pages, it saves the answers. So if there is only one question per page, then the answers will be saved frequently because the user is forced to change pages to work another problem.
Related issue: It is not obvious for students that the answers are saved on gateway quizzes from one page to the other. For this reason they typically try to grade each page/problem like on homework assignments and then they run out of attempts if the number of graded submissions is limited. Maybe it would be useful to mention the saving of the answers when students start the gateway quiz, and/or a "confirm grade test" warning with cancel option would be useful.
I have started a discussion on GitHub about adding a confirmation when a student clicks "Grade test" (https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork2/discussions/1612).
In terms of saving answers, I think it is good to tell students that their answers are saved when they switch pages on a gateway quiz, though I don't know if this should be included directly as part of the Gateway Quiz page.
For my usage I have switched all of my quizzes to one question per page so that answers are saved every time a student navigates to a new page. I have run into the situation you describe where students submit their quiz after answering the first question, but I have mostly mitigated this by providing them with a practice quiz in advance of the first quiz, and then having a low stakes first quiz where they are not significantly penalized for submitting after the first question.
I also am going to suggest that in the Gateway pages, the links for "Preview answers" be changed to "Save and preview answers", since clicking preview is another way to make sure that answers are saved.