We need some help investigating an issue of students reporting frequent lockouts of quizzes. We are using Moodle 2.3.
We know this can happen when students lose connectivity, improperly close their browser, or time out of Moodle. The number of reports we are getting from our participants over the past 1-2 weeks suggests something else is affecting this behavior. It may be set-up error, but is occurring in more than one course.
Students have reported being unable to enter a Quiz. When we check the quiz results, the individual's activity shows as "In Progress," but no answers have been saved.
What is the best approach to investigating this? We have tried duplicating the students' experience and can't identify when/how this happens. We have reset their attempt to Zero in order for them to re-enter. One student was not listed as ever having attempted the quiz, but was still blocked.
We are getting reports of students unable to complete a quiz In Progress. This may be user error; we can't force it to happen and students do not provide much detail about the way they enter/exit quizzes. We don't know where to start with probable cause.
Can you point us in the right direction to resolve this?
Thank you!
Several things:
1. You need to set up Debugging. Set it to level at least ALL, and preferably DEVELOPER. Leave 'Display debug messages' turned off, so the messages are just written to the server log files, but find those logs and see what messages are being written there, if any.
2. Also look at the non-error logs, that is the web server logs that list every request made, and the Moodle logs in the database. What else is going on on the server when students experience problems?
3. "We have tried duplicating the students' experience" is absolutely the right thing to try to do, if you can. You need to look for any common factors among the students who are having problems (and differences from students who are not). Things that might be relevant: Student's web browser. Details of the students' roles (Try Admin -> Check permissions in the quiz). ... Those are the two most obvious, but there are other potential similarities or differences (groups, time zones, ...)
4. As well as PHP errors, can you monitor other aspects of the server performance. E.g. CPU load and memory usage. Anything suspicious there?