Online Text Assignments Appear Truncated

Online Text Assignments Appear Truncated

by Sergio Mazzarelli -
Number of replies: 6

Various teachers that use Moodle (1.7.1) at my college report that their students' online text assignments often appear truncated.

The strange thing is that if a student who reports the problem presses Edit My Submission she can see the whole assignment. However, after submitting or resubmitting she sees only part of the assignment. Teachers reviewing the assignment see it truncated. The word count only refers to the part that is visible.

This does not happen to all students, but to a significant number of them (around 30%). The cut point is not always the same. I see it occurring after as few as 36 words or as many as 399 words. It also does not seem to matter whether the text is divided into paragraphs. On the other hand, I have not yet seen a sentence truncated in the middle.

Another thing that does not matter is having inline comment turned on or off. However, I observe that this function, even if turned on, does not appear to be working. In the past, the teacher would see the students’ text in the editing box, but now all he or she can see there is a blank space. This happens regardless of whether the assignment appears truncated or not. (Any Quick Grading comment typed by the teacher appears correctly.)

Finally, it does not matter whether the text was typed directly or pasted from another document, and whether the teachers use IE or Firefox. (All students use IE).

If I log in as Administrator the assignment appears truncated to me as well. However, if I use Login As and take the identity of the student who wrote the assignment, pressing Edit My Submission allows me to see the whole assignment.

I looked at some older courses that worked fine last year in 1.5.3 and which I did not delete. Even in those courses, online text assignments that were fine at the time appear now truncated.

This is a major crisis as we have 500 students in 19 classes on this server, so I would really appreciate any suggestions.

Thank you very much in advance.

Sergio Mazzarelli

 (Debian Etch PHP 5.2.0.8.3 MySQL 5.0.32)

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In reply to Sergio Mazzarelli

Re: Online Text Assignments Appear Truncated

by John Isner -
Are your students cutting and pasting from MS Word? If so, this could be the problem. Students who do this should press the Clean Word html button (see screenshot) before submitting the Assignment. Or tell them not to use MS Office (use Notepad, or better still, type directly into the Moodle editor).

Attachment Clean_Word_HTML_button.png
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In reply to John Isner

Re: Online Text Assignments Appear Truncated

by Sergio Mazzarelli -
Thank you very much for your kind reply. Unfortunately, teachers report that the problem affects even students who typed directly into the Moodle editor during classes.
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In reply to Sergio Mazzarelli

Re: Online Text Assignments Appear Truncated

by John Isner -
If so, then you should report this as a new bug. Go to tracker.moodle.org, create an account if you don't already have one, then click "Create a new issue" in the upper left corner of the page. You can copy/paste the text from your original post, which describes the problem very clearly.
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In reply to John Isner

Re: Online Text Assignments Appear Truncated

by Sergio Mazzarelli -

Thank you. I have just done so. Before doing that, however, I spent some time investigating the issue and I believe I was able to determine the cause. For the record, I post my findings here.

The issue affects Online Text Assignments containing apostrophes.  I was able to reproduce the problem myself. For example, if I log in as a student , type a few sentences in an assignment and then make one sentence containing an apostrophe bold using the HTML editor, everything after the sentence in bold disappears after submitting.  If I click Edit my Submission, however, I can see everything I typed. If I log in as a teacher, I can only see the sentence in bold. Even if inline comment is turned on and I press Grade, I cannot see the other sentences, but only the one in bold. The same happens when inserting paragraph codes. In all cases, if all codes are removed or if the apostrophe is removed, the text reappears in its entirety.

As for the inline comment not working, I determined that this issue is unrelated to the previous one. It happens if the teacher types a short comment and later wants to add further comments. In this case, the teacher cannot see the student's assignment in the editing window. Only the short comment is visible and editable. I now wonder if the latter is a feature or a bug. It seems a bug to me.

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In reply to Sergio Mazzarelli

Re: Online Text Assignments Appear Truncated

by Sergio Mazzarelli -

The problem is even more serious than I originally thought. Forum posts are also affected. In that case, if there is an apostrophe in a sentence enclosed in formatting codes (such as paragraph codes, bold codes, italic codes, etc.), any sentence after that one is erased when the user posts the message. 

I also discovered that emoticons, if used in pairs (one before and one after the sentence with the apostrophe) cause a similar problem. In that case the second emoticon and everything that follows it disappear.

The bug report I submitted is here. Since I did not know how to update it to reflect the discovery of the impact of the bug on forum posts as well, I simply added a comment.  

I hope a solution is found soon, as this bug is disrupting the work of teachers at my college and is likely to affect many other users as well. 

Thank you for your help.

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In reply to Sergio Mazzarelli

Re: Online Text Assignments Appear Truncated

by Sergio Mazzarelli -

Are there any other people who are experiencing the same problem? If so, I would like to hear from them. I would be even happier if they could vote for the bug to be solved as soon as possible.

Thanks.

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