[ARCHIVED] Quiz log mystery

[tdelillo]

I am helping a faculty member who is trying to figure out why a student's quiz answers were not saved. The student claims she completed the whole quiz, but the quiz log shows a different story. While that's nothing new, I have never seen a quiz log that looks quite like this:

Regular view -

Table view [edited to show the last few questions] -

It appears that the student did not answer any questions for the first hour and 37 minutes, then answered the last 7 questions simultaneously. What's even weirder is that the time limit for the quiz was 1 hour 15 minutes.

I tried to replicate this a number of ways and could not. The student is not using an outdated browser, and I can tell from her page views that she didn't have multiple instances of the test open.

The instructor opened a ticket with Canvas, and they couldn't offer any additional insights except it must be something with her computer.

Has anyone seen this type of quiz log before and tracked down how it happened?

[baxl]

This has been happening to us, too, and we submitted a ticket to Canvas support.  It seems like it's a bug that's occurring when students click the Submit button more than one time, so it creates concurrent attempts which causes the problem.  Their team is further investigating it.  

[tdelillo]

That's interesting. How are they able to click Submit more than once? Have you been able to replicate the behavior? Is there anything in the students' page views that gives a clue that that is what they did?

[Stef_retired]

 @tdelillo ​ and  @baxl ​, does the quiz generating this result have an access code associated with it?

[baxl]

It does have an access code and it's timed. 

[Stef_retired]

 @baxl , this is indeed a known issue with Canvas quizzes--namely that when an access code for a quiz is required, users can hit the access code submit button repeatedly, which can cause more than one attempt to be generated for the quiz attempt. And that in turn is probably what's causing the oddity in the quiz logging that  @tdelillo  is reporting here. Tracey, what are you hearing from Support?

[tdelillo]

Support left it at "must be something with the student's computer". In this case, an access code is not being used, so the mystery deepens...

[baxl]

I have a ticket open with the development team, so I'll post an update here when I'm notified.  I haven't been able to replicate the behavior.  The users we are seeing with this problem have poor internet connectivity, so at first we thought it had something to do with that, but they didn't see the warning that they lost connection.  There was nothing in their page views to give us a clue either.  I'll keep you posted!

[garth]

"It must be something with the student's computer" doesn't sound like a good answer to me.

Who is reponsible for recording the scores, the student's computer, or the Canvas server?

It sounds as though, at a minimum, a transaction needs to be implemented server side to prevent concurrent submissions of the same quiz. 

• The first submission request should lock that submission server side, update the results, then unlock.
• The second submission request would see the lock and wait until unlocked, then see that the results had already been submitted, and simply return.

There are several locking strategies that could be used.  If concurrency is truly the issue, it can be resolved fairly quickly.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @tdelillo ,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie

[tdelillo]

I never got a definitive answer from Canvas support, but I've never seen it happen again either. I would probably consider it as answered as it's going to get