WeBWorK Main Forum

Some Students are not passing back grades

Some Students are not passing back grades

by Erich Jauch -
Number of replies: 8

I am using 2.20 and LTI 1.3 with Canvas. For almost all of my students everything is working great (I am especially enjoying the updated threshold grade update). However, I have a few students that are accessing WeBWork just fine, but the grade passback is throwing the error "Unprocessable Entity" in the logs.

When I turn on $debug_lti_grade_passback, it seems that there may be some undefined variables in one of my conf files, but running a diff on the distribution my local versions shows nothing.

Any suggestions?

In reply to Erich Jauch

Some Students are not passing back grades

by Erich Jauch -

As to the undefined variables I saw in this thread about moodle and grade passback that those errors are apparently a typo that has now been fixed. I update my instance, but I suspect this will not address my main issue.

In reply to Erich Jauch

Some Students are not passing back grades

by Alex Jordan -

"Unprocessable Entity" is not anywhere in WeBWorK code, so this must be something Canvas is reporting.

Usually with LTI 1.3, when grades pass back for some users, but not all users, it means that WeBWorK has not yet learned the "lis_source_did" for those users (the ones whose grades are not being sent). This should only happen if those users have never actually followed an LTI link from Canvas into WeBWorK. Are your students able to log in with a password instead of using an LTI link from Canvas? If so, can you ask/require that they use Canvas? If you want to require it, there is a setting in the Course Config page, LTI tab, that will require all users (including yourself) to enter WeBWorK via Canvas.

If you have access to the database, you can directly check if users have their lis_source_did in the database. You would use something like this:

select user_id, lis_source_did from `courseName_user`;

where "courseName" should be your course's name. If you see NULL entries, that would confirm that those users haven't used an LTI link yet. But maybe "Unprocessable Entity" means those lis_source_did are there, and something is wrong with them. If you see them there, you could look to see if they seem corrupted.

In reply to Alex Jordan

Some Students are not passing back grades

by Erich Jauch -
None of my students can access directly. I have only allowed faculty to access WeBWork directly. I figured it was something with the database, but I am *VERY* new to administrating WeBWork servers, so I am slowly filling my tool belt with things to try. Thanks for the help!
In reply to Erich Jauch

Some Students are not passing back grades

by Erich Jauch -
None of the source_did's are NULL and none look "wrong". I'll try to meet with the the students to see if they are accessing canvas in some strange way. Is there another database table I should check?
In reply to Erich Jauch

Some Students are not passing back grades

by Alex Jordan -

For now I can't think of anything else, but maybe someone else has insight. I guess one thing I would check is if you can confirm for sure that you are using LTI 1.3, not 1.1.(Because I can think of an explanation if you were using 1.1.)

Also, did you say which grade passback mode you are using? (Sorry if I missed that.)

In reply to Alex Jordan

Some Students are not passing back grades

by Erich Jauch -
I am using LTI 1.3 and the homework passback mode. We have been using 1.3 since the server was set up, so there should be no references to 1.1 anywhere that were not updated unless I set things up wrong (which is certainly possible). We have only be running the server since Fall 24 with 2.19 and I updated to 2.20 after the release.
In reply to Erich Jauch

Some Students are not passing back grades

by Danny Glin -

The "Unprocessable Entity" error suggests that Canvas can't parse the information that's being sent to it by WeBWorK.  Is there anything different about the students who are getting this error?  I could see potential issues if the usernames of those students contained special characters.

In reply to Danny Glin

Some Students are not passing back grades

by Erich Jauch -
Not that I can see. I also checked the devices they were using as we have been having some issues with safari (not that unusual), but they are using varied devices (pc, mac, tablet,etc).

I assume, like you said, that there is something somewhere that WeBWorK is trying to send to Canvas for these particular students that is strange. A new wrinkle is that it has suddenly fixed itself for one student, and they claim they have done nothing different. I am attempting to get all of them to log in from chrome and check the log to see if something looks strange with $debug_lti_parameters as I have not caught them logging in yet in the log file.