New Quizzes not Saving Student Progress when they click "return" then "resume"

[Madrigal33]

The guide "Taking a New Quiz" states students can save their progress on an untimed "new quiz" by clicking "return" then later "resume" and finish it later, however my students did just that in front of me and when they clicked resume it had not saved their answers, is there any reason why this is not working for my students? My students are using chromebooks. 

[igustafson · Accepted solution]

you will want to contact Canvas Support to look into this with examples by ticket in your help section under your account. This can help us narrow down how best to assist you further. 

[greydon]

Hello @Madrigal33 

Thank you for contacting Canvas Support. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with students unable to resume their New Quiz. What you described is certainly  abnormal behavior as you are correct- they should be able to return and resume as long as the quiz isn't timed and has ran out of time. Additionally, if you made any edits to the due date during the quiz being open, it would auto-submit before they could return.

Here is the Canvas guide:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Student-Guide/How-do-I-resume-a-quiz-that-I-already-started-takin...

In a situation like this, it would be best to contact Canvas Support directly so we can look at the specifics of your course and quiz together. Please feel free to reach out to us directly via email, chat, or phone. Thank you! 

[pbloem]

I have this issue as well. I asked students which browser they used, and I tested with the test student, and it seems like the problem happens in Firefox, but not in Chrome.

For now I'll have to tell students not to rely on Canvas to be robust enough to save their work, and to compose their essays outside of the quiz environment, to avoid any nasty surprises.

[pbloem]

In my case this turned out to be a problem with the ublock origin adblocker. Disabling ublock fixed the problem for me.

(For my money this is still a Canvas bug. The save should never fail silently, and a popular adblocker shouldn't interfere with canvas.)

[ElisabethHelstr]

Do you think it's because Ublock Origin is no longer updating? Our district is still using it and I am starting to suspect it may be causing random issues.

[jmohr1]

I have found that students who use the Brave privacy browser (which is not supported on Canvas but comes as the default browser on some devices) will lose their answers periodically while taking the quiz. Canvas also does not detect a quiz log from these students. I suspect what happens is the privacy extensions prevent Canvas from tracking the user's behavior which invalidates the log.. and clears whatever cache/cookie the quiz data is stored to periodically. So if they take too long to complete a quiz, it will delete the first set of answers before mysteriously submitting the last set of answers.

By extension, I now fear anything that adblocks or promotes user-privacy (which is obviously good...) can potentially disrupt the New Quiz experience.