Assignment grading - won't load first student

Assignment grading - won't load first student

by Stan Klapauszak -
Number of replies: 4

We have recently upgraded to 3.9.1 (from 3.5.7) and have a new issue with Assignment Grading:

Whenever you hit the "Grade" button (this happens wherever the Grade button appears, regardless of the role being used), the system appears to go into a loop trying to load the first student's assignment for grading - it just displays an endless looping circle:

When you click on "Change user" to view the next student's assignment it loads correctly, and then it also allows you to "Change user" back to the first student and it loads correctly. It's just the first student that fails to load when the "Grade" button is hit.

Any ideas?

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In reply to Stan Klapauszak

Re: Assignment grading - won't load first student

by Emma Richardson -
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How many students in the course?  I wonder if something is timing out on the first page load?  Also, do you have the document converter set up?

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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Assignment grading - won't load first student

by Stan Klapauszak -
Hi Emma - thanks for the response.

It doesn't seem to matter how many students are in the course, or how many have submitted the assignment - we've tested it with a range of sizes from about 3 to about 30 and get the same behavior each time. And it doesn't appear that anything is timing out or failing either, it just loops forever - I've run it with Debugging turned on and it produces no debugging messages.

We have both the Unoconv and Google drive document converters installed but both are disabled. I just enabled both as a test, and it made no difference. We also have the Annotate PDF plugin installed, but it too is disabled.

Stan
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In reply to Stan Klapauszak

Re: Assignment grading - won't load first student

by Emma Richardson -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
Have you tried it with debugging turned on to full developer mode? Also, check your server logs for any related errors...
When you go to a different student, does the document load in the annotation window?
In your server settings, does the path to ghostscript have a check mark by it?
Also, I have seen in the past if a pdf was attempted to be loaded when something was not working, it would not load again and it had to be deleted and reuploaded...if your grading page is always going to the same student first, you might try reuploading that student's assignment.
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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Assignment grading - won't load first student

by Stan Klapauszak -
Hi Emma - thanks for those ideas. Here are some responses:

- I've turned debugging to the highest possible mode - no error messages received. It just cycles forever - I've left it for 10 minutes, and nothing ever fails or times out - just keeps cycling...

- I've looked in a bunch of different logs, and see no error messages there either. But I might not be looking at every possible log - which ones would you suggest are most likely to show something?

- we have had problems with GS, and right now the GS path doesn't have a checkmark. BUT that's exactly why we disabled the Annotate PDF plugin. If the Annotate PDF plugin is disabled, how would the GS path be coming into play? Also, we had a problem with the GS path when we were still on 3.5.7 (and disabled the plugin there), and it didn't produce this problem.

- we've tried this with multiple different classes with lots of different "first" students, so we're confident it's not a specific PDF or assignment. Further, most of our students actually use Online Text for their assignments, so there isn't any PDF loading going on anyways - but we get this problem irrespective of the student or how they submitted the assignment.

Still scratching my head...

Stan
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