Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Chris Lewis -
Number of replies: 11

Hello,

We are having a very strange issue on our campus with some of the quizzes.  Some of the students (roughly 10%) claim that the quizzes are being submitted without them clicking anything.  This is especially strange because it is not happening with all of the quizzes (so far just two) and it is not happening to all students.

I have not been able to get all of the information but here is what I do have.  Both of the quizzes that have been reported were using the Respondus lock-down browser.  One of the quizzes was in a class of 17 and the other was in a class of 100+.  The Moodle logs have an entry for "close attempt" and the Apache logs have a POST entry for that exact time.  The attempt was reset for the students and they were able to continue taking the quiz without a problem.  The “submission” did not happen at the same time for all students.  The submissions happened from 1 to 15 minutes into the quiz.

From everything that I can see it looks like the student clicked "Submit" but for 20 of them to do that is a bit perplexing.  I am wondering if anyone has seen this or has any idea what I could check.  We are running Moodle 1.9.9 on Apache with eAccelerator and MySQL (the DB server is separate from the web server).  I do not think that this is due to the quiz module (I am sure these forums would have been lit up about this if it was a bug in the code) but I have no idea what could be causing this.


Thanks.

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In reply to Chris Lewis

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

The one think in the quiz that could auto-submit is the coutdown timer clock.

Also, pressing enter in a form will submit that form, but surely that will only do the save/submit - whatever the first button is. And anyway, there should be JavaScript that prevents Enter from submitting anything during the quiz.

I would be really inteseted to know if you can work out what is happening here. As you say, with 20 sutudents, it can't just be user error.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Chris Lewis -

Yeah, we verified that pressing enter has no effect on the quiz.  Is their any way to tell if the quiz is being auto submitted (via the countdown timer script) versus pressing the button?

We have been testing this all day and we cannot reproduce the error.  For now, I think we are going to tell our faculty to allow two attempts on the quiz.

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In reply to Chris Lewis

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Do you Apache logs include the POST data? If so, look to see whether the timeup variable was submitted. If not, I don't think there is any way to know.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Chris Lewis -

Yeah, the log is as follows:

255.255.255.255 - - [01/Dec/2010:10:01:19 -0500] "POST /moodle/mod/quiz/attempt.php?q=1914&page=0 HTTP/1.1" 303 254

But the timeup variable was not in it.  Should it have been (if it was the JavaScript that submitted it)?

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In reply to Chris Lewis

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

That is only showing the GET parameters in the URL (the query string). The POST will have sent more data than that in the body of the request, but it looks like it was not logged (which is normal).

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In reply to Chris Lewis

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Chris Lewis -

I believe that we found the problem. We use Respondus Lockdown Browser for a majority of our tests.  That product has a javascript.php in the mod/lockdown directory file that just consists of a commented out copyright statement.  I renamed that file to .bad (so it wouldn't get read in) and all of the reports of quizzes being auto-submitted stopped.  I found this because firebug started reporting javascript errors when the quiz was launched.

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In reply to Chris Lewis

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Chris Lewis -

Well, it came back, like a bad penny.  The javascript issue did resolve the problem initially but today for some reason it started again.  I was able to gather a little more information.  The students (about 50 of 400) claim that it happened within the first 10 minutes of the quiz.  Some say it happened when they changed from page to page, other claim it just submitted without clicking the button.  It was verified on multiple browsers (IE, and Firefox) and many different computers. 

I looked at some of our system graphs (from munin) and the only correlation that I can see is a small uptick in disk latency.  Our system is divided up into app/data and database servers.  The disk latency was noticed on the app/data server.  I am not convinced that they are related because I just do not see how latency could cause the behaviour we are seeing.  I am sure people on this forum know more about this than I do so maybe someone can explain it.

I appreciate any ideas!  Oh, this is running on Moodle 1.9.13.

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In reply to Chris Lewis

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

I still can't think what might be causing this.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Chris Lewis -

I added some logging to attempt.php and the "auto-submit" is coming from the timer going off.  Even though the students have plenty of time remaining (50+ minutes) the timer is being set and the quiz is then being submitted.  I double checked the server time and it is correct.  It looks like the timer goes off of the client time.  Is that correct?  This might explain why it came back out of nowhere, we came to the end of DST on 11/6.  The computers all talk back to an NTP server but I am not sure if they are talking back before the quiz is started.

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In reply to Chris Lewis

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

The auto-submit is triggered from the client-side, but the problem will only occur if the computer updates DST in the middle of the quiz attempt - which requires the student to be attempting the quiz at 2:00am!

There is already MDL-27570 about improving the counter. Please feel free to vote for that.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Quizzes being Auto-Submitted?

by Chris Lewis -

Yep, that makes sense.  Our students use laptops that have two partitions on them one for regular use, and the other strictly for online testing.  The online testing partitions are very rarely booted (only when a quiz is being given).  So my guess is that the students booted the machine, started the quiz and sometime in the first few minutes the system adjusted for DST and caused the timer to submit the quiz.  

Thank you very much for helping me out on this one!  It was a strange issue and I am very glad we have an answer.  Before our university switched from WebCT to Moodle, support was a very big concern.  I must say that the Moodle community is one of the most helpful I have ever seen!  Thank you and keep up the good work!

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