Canvas Quiz Submission Not Reflecting in Records

[AbdulKhadar]

We are experiencing an issue with a Canvas quiz submission that requires your immediate attention.

A student has completed and submitted a quiz on their personal device. On their end, the quiz shows as successfully submitted. However, when we attempt to view the submission from the instructor’s side or within the system, it does not appear.

This suggests that the submission is not syncing correctly or is not being recorded properly in the system, despite appearing submitted on the student's device.

I would appreciate it if this issue could be investigated urgently. Please advise on the cause, any necessary troubleshooting steps, and how to proceed to ensure the student’s work is not lost or penalized.

Regards

Abdul

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @AbdulKhadar,

For a question like this, you would really need to contact Canvas support (if that option is available at your school/institution).  The global Instructure Community is mostly comprised of other Canvas users/administrators.  While many of us are experienced and can answer a lot of technical questions about Canvas, we don't have any access to your Canvas courses, accounts, or content, so we can't look at any specific things like this.  We've been using Canvas at my institution for about 12 years now, and I don't think we've ever had a situation like this, so I'd say it's either an extremely rare edge case bug or some sort of miscommunication with the student about what they see on their end vs what you see on yours.

I hope this info helps a bit.

-Chris

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @AbdulKhadar,

For a question like this, you would really need to contact Canvas support (if that option is available at your school/institution).  The global Instructure Community is mostly comprised of other Canvas users/administrators.  While many of us are experienced and can answer a lot of technical questions about Canvas, we don't have any access to your Canvas courses, accounts, or content, so we can't look at any specific things like this.  We've been using Canvas at my institution for about 12 years now, and I don't think we've ever had a situation like this, so I'd say it's either an extremely rare edge case bug or some sort of miscommunication with the student about what they see on their end vs what you see on yours.

I hope this info helps a bit.

-Chris

[James · Accepted solution]

Within the last year, I've seen faculty swear they did something but there is no record of it in Canvas ... not even of them being logged in at the time. We never figured out exactly what happened, but one lingering question I had was whether the user did the work in the beta or test instance instead of production. Some schools take extra effort to make sure that people cannot log into those instances, but it's not the default.

The other issue, especially related to classic quizzes has to do with lack of submission records (and especially when there was no due date, but it happened in other cases). This was a known issue in December 2024 and January 2025 and I wrote a few places about Canvas putting out a patch to make sure that it didn't happen again, but not fixing the places it where it had already happened. I would hope that all of the cases had worked through the system, but possibly not. The thing is that students were not supposed to be able to take the quiz without a submission record, but that may not have been absolute (it was a symptom). Another symptom was the lack of a submission in SpeedGrader -- the name of the student just didn't show up.

There were a couple of ways to fix it. One is to publish/unpublish the assignment but that's only if no one has taken it yet. The second way to change the due date. Set the due date to something and save it. Then set it back to what you want. Those techniques created the missing submission record and then it would show up. I'm not positive that's the problem, but it's something to try.