[LON-CAPA-admin] Logging Student Activity

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Hi,

On Apr 13, 2010, at 9:25 AM, Mark Lucas wrote:
> 
> I have a situation, which happens every once in a while, that a student claims they completed the
> assignment, but then they go back and there's no sign of the work.

So, that is what actually the receipt numbers are good for. They are unique proof that a student completed an assignment. If you have a policy that no complaints will be considered unless the student shows valid receipt numbers, this does not happen.

>  
> 
> Obviously, things like this are always suspect. In this case I went back through the activity log through
> LON-CAPA, checked the activity file under the library server, and poked through the Apache logs.
> 
> My problem is that I find some inconistency between these three. This student logged in on Monday
> to look at her lab materials as recorded on the Activity log produced within LON-CAPA, but the activity.log
> file of logins and printouts does not show this access.


Did you look at that through the shell?

Note that these files are compiled into XML-files when looking at them through LON-CAPA, so the one file is slowly eaten up in favor of the other.

Discrepancies between login-times and worked times occur if the student stays logged in overnight.

> 
> On the other hand, there is a login April 7 which is listed in the activity.log and supported by
> httpd access logs, but not listed in the course activity.

Course activity would actually only be logged once the student is in the course.

> It did look like the student was having
> problems getting around a critical message, but there were then accesses of several
> 105 homework problems that have no record of submissions either on the Check Activity link
> or the course chart/grading.
> 
> The student claims to have logged in Thursday night to complete the assignment at the help 
> session, and the TA is going to try to identify them (they were only one of two students
> for this course on Thursday).
> 
> All this said, my big question is whether anyone else has run into situations like this?

At the moment, I cannot see how this can happen, except: Log-data is buffered in the client processes for a while and then flushed periodically or on clean shutdown. If a process crashed, that particular log data might be gone

Homework data, to my knowledge, has never vanished.

- Gerd.