Missing Exam Submission

[xxie34]

Hi all,

An instructor asked me this question, and I have no clue why this is happening.

A student submitted an online quiz, and she sees the grades. But the instructor cannot see the submission. As far as the instructor and I can see, there is no submission of this quiz. For her, the clock of the exam is still ticking (it's not a timed exam). But on the student's screen, her quiz was submitted, and she got a score.

Her logs show up normal compared to those whose submission was received. So I'm not sure what is happening. Does anyone have any insights?

[kona]

 @xxie34 , super strange! Screen shot everything (or make a video) and submit it to Canvas Support!

[xxie34]

Hi Kona,

I don't have the student's screenshot. But I could screenshot what I see on my end. 

And this may be an entry level question, but is Canvas Support an email or a website? 

[kona]

If possible, I'd verify again what the student is seeing - a Canvas admin can log in as the Student to see exactly what the student is seeing. As for Canvas Support if you have the Help link in Canvas you can click on it and "Report a Problem." This goes to Canvas Support.

[xxie34]

I am a sub account admin. I don't think (correct me if I'm wrong) that I can log in as the student? But I will ask the student for a screenshot if I can't. 

[kona]

That should help!

[abunag]

as a subaccount admin, you don't have the masquerade feature.  I'd suggest trying to find a root account admin at your institution to assist with that.

[xxie34]

I did. Thx

[abunag]

The only thing I'd suggest double checking is that everyone's in the same Canvas instance.  For example, if you and the instructor are in Prod (schoolname.instructure.com), but the student took the quiz in Test (schoolname.test.instructure.com), you and the student would be seeing different info.

Is the student using the app or a traditional browser?  What do the page views look like?

[xxie34]

Yes everyone is in the same instance. And the student was using a traditional browser. The page views looked normal. They show that she started the exam at the expected time and since it was an open-book exam, she was visiting various materials on the course for the 2 hours. 

[xxie34]

Here's the masquerade screenshot. It suggests that the student didn't submit the exam.

And here's the reply that I got from the instructor when I showed him this screenshot:

"Thanks for investigating! I'm confused. This is not the view I saw when I looked at Danielle's exam page (wish I had screenshot that). There was no "resume quiz" button and her score was displayed as if the exam had just been submitted. I wonder now if she had the quiz open in two browsers, though I've seen students successfully do that before if something did not display in one they try another."

[kona]

 @xxie34 , In the upper corner it says the student's grade is 92/100 for this quiz... which seems to imply that the student has submitted it at some point and gotten a grade. 

Just to double-double check I'd recommend creating a temporary password for this student and literally log in as the student - so don't masquerade as the student - or have the student come in and log in for you. I only suggest this because there have been a few times when what I saw when masquerading didn't match what the student was seeing. I contacted support and they said masquerading doesn't always show exactly what the student sees/experiences.  

[xxie34]

No the instructor gave her the grade manually after he saw the grade on her screen. 

And it's good to know about the masquerading not matching the reality. I asked the instructor to ask the student to log in and submit again, so we will see what she says. 

[kona]

Ah, that makes sense and yes, I'd be very interested to see what it's currently showing on the student's screen. This is a strange case and if you haven't already, definitely report this to Canvas Support!

[xxie34]

The campus level admin did report to Canvas Support. Unfortunately they haven't been very helpful with their responses. 

[tdelillo]

Have you verified that students only get one attempt on the quiz? Also, the instructor's comment about the quiz being open in two browsers is another possibility. We have seen some oddities where the students do that, and the timer runs out and auto-submits the version the student is NOT actively working on (giving them a low score or no score). In the case of a quiz with no time limit, I'm not sure what would happen if the student had two instances open and only submitted one.

[xxie34]

Yes the students only get one attempt on the quiz.

And since we are talking about the timer issue, this is completely unrelated, but there was one case where one student submitted on the device in the classroom (during an in class work shop), but the quiz on his/her personal device was still going, and when that timed out, it erased the attempt that they submitted previously in class. It sounded like it was a made up story but it was what happened!

[xxie34 · Accepted solution]

OK I think we figured out what happened, and it actually is extremely similar to the case that I mentioned in my previous reply to  @tdelillo ‌. Here is what the instructor said:

"I think what happened is that the student started the exam on her computer, a Mac. When Excel froze on that computer, she opened needed Excel files from a CLC computer, which required going into the exam quiz to access file links. She submitted from the CLC computer, but Canvas did not record that, even though it was scored - a 90 before questions that I needed to manually grade. The score of 90 matches my sense of Danielle's understanding of the material.

Students have opened exams in multiple machines before, and I was nervous the first time, but it worked fine - until this case! Perhaps I should have a separate module of files for exams, so an exam quiz is open only for answering questions."

Combined with the previous example (see reply above), it sounds like (either sometimes or always, we cannot verify at this point) Canvas takes the first time ever opening the quiz as THE attempt to keep the score of, although it would make the most sense (to me and to others I hope!) if the session actually submitted, no matter if it was the first time the quiz was opened, should be regarded as the attempt to keep. If someone could get the attention of Canvas to fix this flaw, it would be great! As you can see it happens more than once.

[kona]

Thanks for sharing what  you were able to figure out. We haven't had this happen, but it's good to know that it's a possibility if it comes up!