Final Update-6/29/2017
Well, THIS certainly took an unanticipated turn! Apparently, this is now correct behavior. Here is Instructure's answer to this issue:
I went ahead and confirmed with our Product team that this is working as intended. You are correct that previous to our 6/24/17 release students were allowed to progress past muted quizzes with the "Score at least" requirement but that should have never been possible and so it was fixed in our 6/24/17 release. The reasoning for this is that muted assignments should show no indication to the student as to what their score is. If a student were to be allowed to progress past a quiz, then that would indicate to the student that their grade is at least above a certain number, which goes against the whole purpose of muting an assignment. As such modules have been updated to ignore all progression requirements when an assignment is muted, in order to not reveal any indication to the student as to what their grade is on the muted assignment. Once the assignment is unmuted, they will receive their grade and be allowed to progress.
I do apologize for any inconvenience this might cause for you or your instructors, but since this change was made in an effort to fix an existing, flawed behavior, it is not currently being considered for a change back to how it previously functioned.
I understand the logic; after all--why mute it if by virtue of being able to proceed they know they attained a good score--but it's the closest we had to having a sort of "progressive" exam setup. Sigh. Well, count me as another one waiting to see what https://community.canvaslms.com/community/ideas/quizzesnext?sr=search&searchId=6578cb36-28a2-43e1-92... may hold in our future!
Update - 6/29/2017
This has been received by Instructure and is filed under case #02143813 and has been elevated to the next level of support. According to the initial response received: "It appears this behavior could have resulted from a fixed bug in the latest release found HERE under 'Muted Assignments and Minimum Score Requirements' -although, I'm not entirely positive. However, I will forward this to our next level of support so they may investigate further. As soon as they have further information they will follow up with you via this email."
I'm posting this to see if this is unique just to my institution, but also as a warning to anyone who may be in the midst of using assessments in a similar manner to how we are. This is very unique arrangement that likely will not affect most of you, but for what it's worth here it is! I have submitted a case to Canvas.
Here's the scenario. So far I can tell from my own testing, all of the following must apply for this bug to appear:
- There are multiple quizzes in a module. Say, Quiz A, Quiz B, Quiz C.
- Students must complete all of the requirements in the Module in order.
- Let's say that students must score 2/3 on Quiz A in order to advance to Quiz B. (These are all MC-type questions; so they are automatically scored.)
- The scores are MUTED. (This is important!)
To illustrate, here's a very simple example of the Module rules that I created when replicating the issue:
As I (and some 80+ incoming freshmen!) found out yesterday, they can NOT advance to Quiz B. Why?!? As I found out through multiple tests of my own after our little event, it was because the scores are MUTED. Unmute the scores? No issue. Scores muted? Issue. The screen they would see is similar to this one after clicking the NEXT button to progress to the next quiz, even with a perfect score on the first one:
Again, the "solution" is simply to unmute the assignments, though for various reasons our faculty don't want students to see the scores as they are taking it.
We have had a similar arrangement for several years with these assessments without issue. My personal hunch is that "something" broke with this weekend's update.
Oh, and for the record: I enabled the new Blueprint Courses feature on our server, but even disabling it made no difference....so I don't think it was that.
Thank You! Great tip, for those developing a more complicated structure!
