attachment corrupted student upload to grade center

[Josie4]

Can anyone explain why a student pdf attachment uploaded to Canvas would be corrupted and the faculty not able to open? 

Thank you.  

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Josie4,

This is a very tough question to answer...  I think it may be easier to figure out what's are NOT the likely causes then go from there...

My institution has been using Canvas LMS for 11 years now, and as the primary admin I can say that I don't think we have had a single case where Canvas itself corrupted a file upload.  As a tech person though, I could dream up some very edge case scenario where it could happen.  It would be so rare that I'd pretty much rule it out.

The next thing I'd rule out in general is that a faulty internet connection corrupted the file.  Similar to the above, so many things would have to go wrong for this to happen that I'd basically rule it out at this point.

With those two things out of the way, we could speculate about software on the student's machine...  How did they create the PDF?  Was it right from Word, or maybe using some other 3rd party software?  If using 3rd party software, it could have potentially done something wrong, though that's still not very likely.

Next, it could be that the student doesn't know what a PDF is and how to properly make one. Maybe they just renamed a .docx file to .pdf, which would basically make a "corrupt" pdf in the eyes of a PDF viewer.

It's also possible that the student intentionally corrupted the file (there are websites that will do that) in an effort to get an extension on the assignment or something along those lines.  It may be hard to prove this, but I don't want to overlook the possibility.

There are probably other scenarios I haven't thought of, but I hope the ones I listed here help you out a bit!

-Chris