Turnitin assingments being submitted randomly

Turnitin assingments being submitted randomly

by Hittesh Ahuja -
Number of replies: 6

We have seen a mysterious behaviour with turnitin assignments since last year.  Ill explain this in 3 scenarios :

  1. If you add a blank assignment to Moodle with turnitin enabled and run the cron, the assignment is not uploaded to turnitin i.e it does not show up under the class as an assignment point.
  2. If you then add a student submission to the assignment ,say Student A, and run the cron, even that is not reflected on the turnitin side.
  3. If you add another submission to the same assignment, say Student B, only then it creates the assignment point in Turnitin , adds the second assignment file submission to the that assignment. 

We tried everything from comparing server configurations to checking permissions to the dataroot folder. We have finally managed to get somewhere with this as we realised it only happened on the live server database and not on our test server. Both have the exact same structure expect for the fact the our test db is a bit older than the live . 

Would anyone know what tables do i see for differences when im comparing both databases. As of now, the only tables that comes to my mind are the plagiarism_* tables and the event_* tables , but I'm not sure on what corrupt data( if any) would stop turnitin from working fine only from the second assignment submission onwards.

Any help will be highly appreciated.

BTW, we are using Dan Marsden's integration

Using Moodle 2.5.1

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In reply to Hittesh Ahuja

Re: Turnitin assingments being submitted randomly

by Dan Marsden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

I'd check your events_queue tables to make sure there aren't any events being held incorrectly - also make sure debugging is turned on and check your error logs when cron is running.

Turnitin have recently developed a new API which is a lot better than the old API that my plugin relies on - Turnitin have also developed a new plugin to replace mine which uses their new API - the new code is available in github here: https://github.com/jmcgettrick/MoodleDirectV2

The start of the year is a good time to test the new code too. I have a couple of clients about to start testing it over the next few weeks.

I spent some time reviewing the new code for Turnitin and it follows Moodle coding and security guidelines well.

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Turnitin assingments being submitted randomly

by Hittesh Ahuja -

Hi Dan,

Many thanks for the suggestions. Ill try this and post my findings here.

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Turnitin assingments being submitted randomly

by Hittesh Ahuja -

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your response. 

is it (even remotely ) possible that files are not submitted to turnitin if there are pending events in the events_queue table and corresponding entries in the mdl5_events_queue_handlers table ?

If so, is regular housekeeping of these queues the only solution to prevent clogging up of submissions ?

 

Many thanks

Hittesh

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Turnitin assingments being submitted randomly

by Hittesh Ahuja -

I've also realised that this only happens after a submission has been delayed by the cron with this message -

Warning: assign start date is too early 2014-01-16 18:51:48 in course moodle-dev-testing-ground assign events_with_live_data will delay sending files until next cron


After that, the file is never submitted to turnitin in the subsequent crons and it is removed from the queue tables.

Any idea why ?

 

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In reply to Hittesh Ahuja

Re: Turnitin assingments being submitted randomly

by Dan Marsden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

It should only get removed from the queue tables on a succesful submit - if that's not happening you'll need to debug further.

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Turnitin assingments being submitted randomly

by Hittesh Ahuja -

I think ill try and upgrade the turnitin code to the latest version on your github.. you authored a fix to lib.php a month ago . In the modified code, unlike before, you are actually sending false back to the events API thereby holding the event in the events queue table.

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