Quizzes close suddenly

Quizzes close suddenly

by Roberto Becerra -
Number of replies: 9
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Hi, we are experiencing this situation where students are thrown out of their quiz, still with time remaining. 

-All students get thrown out at the same time. 

- it has happened at any point in their attempt, start, mid or end, it doesn't seem to matter. Is more like students get kicked out at one particular time. 

-They come back and it says the quiz has been already submitted. 

- it has happened with big groups or one single person using the test. 

-Quizzes fail with either start/end times or not, and with grace period or auto submission. But always with time limit (is a must for us) 

Other oddities: 

-quiz cannot be duplicated, a dB error shows about not finding an answer. 

-Sometime I have noticed that the quiz related scheduled tasks' las run is some 10 mins in future (!!??) 

Any idea why this??? This is really breaking our system. :/

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In reply to Roberto Becerra

Re: Quizzes close suddenly

by Emma Richardson -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

I would suspect a time issue - maybe your server is out of sync or syncing to something where the time is shifting for some reason.  This could explain all of this behavior. 

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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Quizzes close suddenly

by Roberto Becerra -
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Hi Emma, thanks for your reply.

Yes! I think something like that. Actually I forgot to mention that I did check the time in the server, and it seemed perfectly in time with (at least) my local computer. But maybe it is out of sync with students computers. But then that would not explain why for instance they all got thrown out lets say at 13:23 , all of them. But yes, maybe the server is drifting at times, but then again I see the cron tasks with the correct time most of the time.

I guess the root cause will be a bit tricky here ...
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In reply to Roberto Becerra

Re: Quizzes close suddenly

by Roberto Becerra -
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Update:
I disabled these 3 scheduled tasks, thinking they could be culprit:
- Legacy cron quiz access rules
- Legacy cron quiz reports
- Updating overdue quiz attempts

But sadly the problem still just happened to me while doing tests. argh!
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In reply to Roberto Becerra

Re: Quizzes close suddenly

by Roberto Becerra -
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Another detail I forgot to mention. Participants are thrown out when clicking on "Next Page"
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In reply to Roberto Becerra

Re: Quizzes close suddenly

by Emma Richardson -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
But they are all kicked out at the exact same time right? And I am guessing your quiz is timed with the setting to automatically submit when time runs out. Which means that, for some reason, Moodle thinks it is time to end the quiz and is ending it...I think the next page is just because the browser has not refreshed after "time" has run out. What is your time setting in Moodle?
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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Quizzes close suddenly

by Roberto Becerra -
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Correct, all at the same time.

You mean time settings in the quiz? they are set to start say at 13h and finish at 14h, with a 20 mins limit.

Yes, I have been looking at the access logs in the server and at some point I see a sequence of logs that have times as such : [13:01] [13:02][13:13][13:04] with jumps of around 10 mins. I am guessing the system clock is playing tricks on me. But how to know for sure if it is that, test and fix?
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In reply to Roberto Becerra

Re: Quizzes close suddenly

by Tim Hunt -
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Does your setup have multiple web-servers? Perhaps only one of them has its clock set wrong.
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Quizzes close suddenly

by Roberto Becerra -
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Found the problem! smile our virtual linux server is hosted in a Windows machine, and this machine had a clock offset, so it was correcting every time by 14mins, and this was caught up by moodle at random times when things coincided.

But now our webmaster checked the clocks and found that discrepancy. Damn it was looking so mysterious!
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In reply to Roberto Becerra

Re: Quizzes close suddenly

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
Thanks for confirming. It is always really helpful when people report back to let us know the problem is fixed, and what the acutal issue turned out to be.
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