How does the activity log work for a quiz and how should I interpret it?

[becky_williams]

How does the activity log work for a quiz and how should I interpret it?

The log will say "Stopped viewing the Canvas quiz-taking page..." and then when they resume. I told my students I could monitor their activity during an exam, so they should not leave the page, and several students have this flag in their activity log. However, I have since learned that if the cursor leaves the page (e.g., at the bottom control panel, etc.) , or email popups come across the screen, it could show this message. Often they "stop viewing" for a second or two and it may be a "glitch," but sometimes they resume 1–2 minutes later. Could they still be in the quiz and just thinking? 

#activity log

[KaraTooke]

I have done a number of test on this and not been able to determine what causes Canvas to record that a student has left the page.

From my findings, Canvas will often NOT record instances of students leaving the page. If they go to another tab, open another window or word doc, minimize the quiz, or copy and paste text from other documents. Some of these instances got flagged as "leaving the quiz" but not all of them, and not consistently. For the most part, the only consistent way to get the quiz log to show that I had left the quiz, was to click on the Home, or dashboard button, then navigate back and "Resume" the quiz attempt.

All of the Canvas documentation emphasizes that the Quiz Activity Log is not meant to be used to detect cheating. There are no settings in Canvas to tell the system that a student opening a word document, is cheating, or is accessing a professor approved resource for a question. Canvas has a very open philosophy of teaching, and as such, the quiz allows for teachers to have open book quizzes, internet scavenger hunt quizzes, as well as structured and regulated quizzes.

In the attached picture, I often had results come up where students would appear to have left the quiz, continued to answer questions, and then resumed. Yet, when doing that attempt, I did not leave the quiz, rather I attempted to insert a document into the Essay question using the RCE. there were also other instances where Canvas would record me Leaving the quiz, and resuming the quiz in the same second. I can only assume that the above two instances were glitches, and I was unable to determine what had caused those or how to replicate them.

Note: all of my experiments were done using basic Canvas, with no feature upgrades, and Classic Quizzes.

[DerekArellano]

I know this is an old post, but I am currently being accused of leaving and resuming my exam when I did 100% did not. I am pretty sure my exam was through Canvas New Quizzes and would like to know if this statement may also apply to that.

[MichaelCrowl]

I just went through some testing of my own using basic, free Canvas and wanted to share my thoughts here.  To reiterate that Canvas quiz logs are NOT perfect, take some examples I found when considering some suspicious behavior:

- pic1.png shows this student somehow "stopped viewing" the Canvas page twice in a row.  That makes no sense, and I don't know why it happened.

- pic2.png shows a student answered a question after they "stopped viewing" the webpage.  I theorize that the logging mechanism runs asynchronously, and that's how you get logs like this.  But I can't find any information online to prove this.  One of my own tests generated a log like this, but I still can't explain why.

- pic3.png shows one of my tests using the Test Student.  How could a user stop viewing the Canvas page twice in a row without re-viewing it?  I clicked on another link on the sidebar, and a popup warned me that I would navigate away from the quiz.  I clicked "cancel" to resume the quiz, but for some reason that doesn't generate the log you'd expect.

- I timed some of my self-generated logs at 9-11 seconds, yet Canvas' logs shows a 15 second duration.  Indeed, when I generate a report on these kinds of discrepancies, many of my students show 15 second intervals.  While the duration is not necessarily accurate, the fact that the event happened is accurate.  I have not seen any examples otherwise.

- Like others have said, 0-second events where the student "stopped viewing the page" and then "resumed" could be clicking "X" on a pop-up.  I saw this too during my own tests.

[StollaRutledge]

So im having problems and it doesn't say "View log" on mine it just shows what they answered?