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next section in scaffold problem is not opening for one student

next section in scaffold problem is not opening for one student

by Larry Riddle -
Number of replies: 2

One of my instructors reported that a student in her class correctly answered all the parts in section 1 of a scaffold problem, but section 2 did not open so the student was not able to continue. Here is a screenshot after grading the student's work in section 1.

screenshot

You can see that the answers in section 1 are all correct, but the title bar for section 1 is still yellow and the title bar for the section 2 (Algebraic Manipulation) is still grayed out.

What is odd is that this student appears to be the only student for which this has happened. Other students in the class have successfully completed both sections, and when I accessed the problem as a test student, section 2 opened immediately after submitting the three correct answers in section 1 for grading.

As far as I can tell, there are no errors in the pg code for the scaffolding (file is attached). So I am at a lost as to why this one particular student has this issue. I have resolved it for her by making a copy of the problem and deleting the scaffolding, then editing the homework assignment for this one student to use the revised version. But I would really like to understand what might have caused the issue in the first place in case it happens again. Any ideas?

In reply to Larry Riddle

Re: next section in scaffold problem is not opening for one student

by Danny Glin -

Can you provide the random seed that was assigned to this student?

It's also worth looking at the student's past answers and status in the database to see if anything looks amiss.

In reply to Danny Glin

Re: next section in scaffold problem is not opening for one student

by Larry Riddle -
Unfortunately I do not know the random seed assigned to the student. After I created an edited version of the problem just for her in which I removed the scaffolding, she ran into another issue where her first answer, ln(u), which previously had been marked correct, could now not be verified by the WeBWorK answer checker because a sufficient number of points could not be found. Does the random seed change if a new problem is substituted for the original problem? Anyway, in the hope of a quick fix to that new issue, I changed the random seed to a different number, but I didn't record the original random seed. Sorry.

I did look at her past answers and in her very first attempt all of her answers to the parts in the first section of the scaffolding were correct. It looks like she then tried resubmitting those same three answers twice more which suggests to me that the second section had not opened for her from the very beginning.

I don't know how to check the status in the database.