[LON-CAPA-users] loncapa forgetting submissions?

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Hi David,

Yep, green box means that the server had stored the data, no way around 
it.

The only time I have seen otherwise is about 6 years ago in 
LectureOnline - computer services at another university had restored a 
broken disk from backup, and the data between the last backup and the 
restore was lost - well, duh!

The other time I saw this (twice) was that a student was walking up to 
the open session of a roommate and solved their roommate's homework. 
The student did see green boxes, but just not theirs. We could nicely 
trace everything, no problem.

All three instances of "the computer ate my homework" were human 
negligence.

Use the receipt requirement which Mark suggested earlier - no more 
complaints after that.

- Gerd.

On Mar 28, 2005, at 10:43 AM, Guy Albertelli II wrote:

> Hi David,
>
>> I have a student who is saying that they have submitted some answers 
>> to
>> problems on LONCAPA from home, but they are showing up as never being
>> tried.  They are claiming that they are getting green boxes to 
>> questions
>> when doing the homework at home, and then when they come to school, 
>> the
>> questions are as if they haven't ever been tried.
>
> Lon-CAPA does things internally like this:
>
> 1. the student submits the webpage
> 2. Lon-CAPA parses the homwework problem and decides whether they got
>     it right or wrong
> 3. Lon-CAPA then send the grade information back to their homeserver to
>     be stored in their student record.
> 4. Lon-CAPA then _asks_ their homeserver what the status on the
>     homework problem is.
> 5. Lon-CAPA then reparses the homework problem and uses the just
>     aquired data from their homewserver to render the problem
> 6. Lon-CAPA sends the new webpage out
>
> step 1 and 6 involves users computer to server communication
>
> steps 2,3,4,5 involve at worst server to server communication, and in
> your case with only 1 server, the server talking to itself.
>
> So I can't see any possible way for the student to see a green box,
> and then for them to have absolutely nothing logged in their
> submission record.
>
> and if something has gone awry with steps 2-5, it would affect all
> traffic on that server not just a user here or there.
>
> So without more data (is his accesses logged in
> /var/log/httpd/access_log? How about in trackstudent (Go to Classlist,
> click on the student, (you should be on the aboutme page for that
> student) click on the 'View recent activity by this student' link))
> -- 
> guy@albertelli.com  LON-CAPA Developer  0-7-2-9-
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>
--
Gerd Kortemeyer, Ph.D.
Michigan State University
http://www.lite.msu.edu/kortemeyer/