Nothing is submitting for student

[crisalis]

Canvas is not registering the assignments and quizzes the student submits. Since nothing is submitting, he has multiple assignments with 0 points earned so his grades are beingi impacted on. Professors have tried to reopen things for him to attempt to submit again but it's still not submitting. His log activity seems weird. 

[JeffCampbell]

When you say the log activity is weird, are you able to explain further or provide a screenshot?

This sounds as if it is something glitching on the student's end. You may want to submit a Help ticket through Canvas Support (Report a Problem found under  Help on the left side of your Canvas screen). Usually, there are only two things I have seen for something like this. One, the student uploads a file, but does not hit the button to submit the work. The other...the really did not turn anything in and are just trying to get out of the work. Assuming both are not true, I would mention those options have been eliminated when submitting a ticket.

[crisalis]

Yes. For example, the student says he completed and submitted a quizz. It was submitted but it shows as every question was left unanswered and his log activity of the quiz says he only viewed and possibly read a few questions. Doesn't make sense to me. 

[JeffCampbell]

To be honest, this reply makes it sound as if they opened the quiz, looked at a few questions, then hit submit so it marks the item complete. From my experience of seeing students do this, if parents/teachers are less familiar with Canvas, the student could:

- Tell their parents they have no missing work (it was submitted so won't show up as missing)

- Tell their parents/teachers they submitted it, but Canvas did not save their answers (rare and tech support might be able to discern if true). The equivalent of "the dog ate my homework." 

I've seen similar where students hit the X on the home page "To-Do List" so it clears out something they need to do so if their parents ask if they have any work to finish, it has a message indicating nothing needs to be done.

The log entry should also show how long the student took to complete. Is that time significantly shorter than everyone else? If yes, does this student usually turn things in rushed or do they put in solid work with effort? You mention the student has multiple assignments with 0's earned. If everyone else took an average of 20 minutes to complete the quiz and little Johnny took only 4 minutes, that is a red flag that the student is not being entirely honest with you. 

Here might be a solution. Have the student sit down with you and retake it. Apologize profusely, but tech support has asked you to observe this happening. Then also explain that you want to record the answers so that if the glitch occurs again, you have a record of their answers. Get out a printed copy and record their answers as they go. Then they HAVE TO notify you before hitting submit so you can observe and document what happens for tech support. I suspect that the problem will magically resolve itself. 

[JessicaDeanSVC]

You may also want to pay attention to what they are using to access Canvas- are they trying to submit assignments through the app (notoriously buggy) or an outdated browser (won't be able to process all of Canvas)? Has the student tried a different browser or different device? 

Since you can see their access log, I'm assuming you are a Canvas admin- if you masquerade as the student, can you successfully submit anything? Try this in the beta instance or give the instructor a heads up before you do this though!

[paul_fynn]

Hi @crisalis @JeffCampbell @JessicaDeanSVC 

Contributing here as we are observing similar issues with Canvas new Quiz for a specific student which returned "successful submission" to the student.

• The student logged and attempted the quiz
  • They noted error messages on attempting to submit answers and started to photograph their Laptop, so we have
    • The device time
    • The browser type
    • The URL for the Quiz access
    • Time Remaining on Quiz
    • A screenshot stating "Submission Successful"

1. We have investigated the student access logs and can see no indication that they accessed the quiz
2. We have investigated the quiz itself via quiz moderate
   • There is no attempt shown for this student/quiz - all other students appear to have completed
   • There is no record of any grade in the quiz

In short we have no record that shows the student accessing the quiz on the device that he submitted the answers to.

We can see that the Browser in the photograph has a avatar with the student's initial - it is disadvantageous that the quiz itself does not display the name and / or avatar for the student who is logged into Canvas (in case there is a difference).

We are completely perplexed - the evidence is close to that suggested by @JeffCampbell , albeit not contemporaneous - we may go to our top Canvas Admin to check that what the student is reporting as 'successful submission' is in fact what they see.

Otherwise we may need to log a ticket with Instructure on this.

[JeffCampbell]

A few questions out of curiosity.

- The photos they took...does it show the full screen or just part of the screen? I'm wondering if it shows the menu on the far left that has Dashboard, Courses, Calendar, etc. At the top is the account image. I know many students will have an account image and I wonder if what is seen matches their account. I just tested on my end and, unless someone at your district/institution modified how it is displayed, that menu was visible when attempting the quiz.

- Did they photograph the error messages, or just the "Submission Successful" message?

- Did the student verify they were on the right quiz/test?

- You mentioned the access logs do not indicate that they accessed the quiz. Do the logs indicate they accessed anything during the time frame they supposedly took the quiz? This could indicate if they even were on Canvas, or what area of Canvas, at the time they took the quiz. If they are not even on Canvas at all, that would seem a red flag.

Having the quiz display the name/avatar is something I think could be a good idea. Maybe along the message of "XYZ quiz attempt by Paul Fynn" along the bottom of the screen throughout the quiz (with XYZ being the name of the quiz). I'd suggest putting in an idea request Paul. 

[paul_fynn]

Thanks @JeffCampbell 

to answer inline below....

A few questions out of curiosity.

- The photos they took...does it show the full screen or just part of the screen? I'm wondering if it shows the menu on the far left that has Dashboard, Courses, Calendar, etc. At the top is the account image. I know many students will have an account image and I wonder if what is seen matches their account. I just tested on my end and, unless someone at your district/institution modified how it is displayed, that menu was visible when attempting the quiz.

• Yes, we have all of that but the avatar is our default so not that helpful
• An early question was whether they were in someone else's account - we had a couple who were an item where the chap managed to submit to the lass's assignment - he was complaining because he then had to submit late and she was complaining because she couldn't submit at all 😄 

- Did they photograph the error messages, or just the "Submission Successful" message?

• The whole laptop, and screen, on a question by question basis

- Did the student verify they were on the right quiz/test?

• We can see from the URL that they were in the quiz that we expected them to be in

- You mentioned the access logs do not indicate that they accessed the quiz. Do the logs indicate they accessed anything during the time frame they supposedly took the quiz? This could indicate if they even were on Canvas, or what area of Canvas, at the time they took the quiz. If they are not even on Canvas at all, that would seem a red flag.

• We can see limited iphone access around the time that they were taking the test on the PC (the one they used to photograph) but nothing sinister

Having the quiz display the name/avatar is something I think could be a good idea. Maybe along the message of "XYZ quiz attempt by Paul Fynn" along the bottom of the screen throughout the quiz (with XYZ being the name of the quiz). I'd suggest putting in an idea request Paul. 

• I think you are right - I think there may be other areas where it might be beneficial to have the student name appear on output, although we use student IDs for anonymity around submission and grading, so SID might be better - or it could be locally configurable as account/sub-account/course level
  • Potentially this links to some other current threads around "whole award audit requirements" where we need to provide samples and feedback across many modules and multiple years - I've already noted the difference in file naming conventions between printing an assessment rubric for a student, and downloading the submission (and annotations) for the same student ...
  • It's one of those areas where the design principle needs to be established (I'd love to see a print button on each Canvas Asset) then consistently applied to different contexts

[JeffCampbell]

Hmm...definitely curious. If the logs do show they were accessing the quiz, I think your question of being on the wrong account is a concern. I would find it hard to believe that Canvas would glitch it's access logs for a single account at that exact moment in such a way that the logs show no access to the quiz, but pictures show them taking the quiz. I go no further ideas.

[greydon · Accepted solution]

Hello @crisalis 

If you are still needing help after checking all of these suggestions, I definitely recommend speaking with Canvas Support directly. They have access to more tools to really see where the student was and all of the actions they took during these assignments etc. It can be helpful for them to delve into it and take a further look - just a suggestion.

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Basics-Guide/How-do-I-contact-Canvas-Support/ta-p/389767