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Grade passback updates, multiple attempts, and Blackboard

Grade passback updates, multiple attempts, and Blackboard

by Wesley Burr -

Hi, folks,

Advice welcome on this issue. One of our faculty allows multiple attempts on his quizzes. The LTI grade passback appears to work fine for this, and it reports the highest grade.

However, for one student, the faculty member logged in and manually changed his grade. This manual change does not appear to be captured and passed back -- Blackboard is reporting the highest of the non-edited grades only. 

Any thoughts on what's happening? At least to a first glance by me, it looks like the grade updates -- I can see the 15/15 on the edited one when I view it from the course page, and from the student perspective. But that 3rd try quiz grade of 15/15 isn't passing back. 

It's just this one student, and just this one edit, and I haven't been able to figure out if there's anything deeper.

-W

Grade passback updates, multiple attempts, and Blackboard

by Glenn Rice -

The first thing that you should note is that when an instructor changes the grade of an assignment for a student, the grade is not immediately passed back.  If you have the automatic grade passback enabled and you have the webwork2 job queue running, then that grade will be passed back the next time the automatic grade passback occurs.  By default that happens once every 24 hours, but the interval can be changed in the settings.

So the things to check are do you have mass grade passback enabled in authen_LTI.conf (or the course configuration for the course), and do you have the webwork2 job queue set up and running.

Note that if you go to the "Job Manager" page in the course, then you can see all mass grade passback jobs that have occurred in the last few days.  If you don't see anything there, then you probably don't have mass grade passback enabled.  If you see several jobs that are in the "inactive" state, then you probably don't have the webwork2 job queue running.

If you see jobs that are completed, then you have things set up.  Then look at the details (click on the info icon for the job), and that will show you lots of detail on the mass grade passback job.

Grade passback updates, multiple attempts, and Blackboard

by Alex Jordan -

One caveat on the 24 hours, or whatever amount of time is set for the mass grade passback. First, that amount of time must pass since the last mass passback. But I believe† that even then, something (pretty much anything) has to happen in the WeBWorK course to trigger the system recognizing that enough time has passed. So waiting 24 hours and looking at grades in the LMS may not be enough. Logging in to the WeBWorK course might be needed before you check the LMS grades (if no students have already done that in that recent window of time.) 

†This is how things worked at one time before the job manager. I'm not sure if it still works this way.

And then I would add that if you ever manually change a grade, you could also just use the LTI Grades Update tool to directly trigger a grade passback for that user (and for that assignment, if that matters).

Grade passback updates, multiple attempts, and Blackboard

by Glenn Rice -
Yes, mass passback still works as Alex said. Someone needs to visit a page in the course in order to trigger the actual mass passback after the time interval has passed.

Grade passback updates, multiple attempts, and Blackboard

by Wesley Burr -

The Job Manager for this course seems to just time out when I try to access it. Yes, automatic grade passback is enabled; the job queue is running; and the default has been less for the mass  update with 86400 seconds as the timeline. So 24 hours. 

I did enable $LTIGradeOnSubmit = 1 last year, and that's been running ever since, so it's possible that the Job Manager times out because there's just too many records in the system to load them all for display. 

I'll get the instructor to try manually syncing the grades with the LTI tool and report back. Thanks!

Grade passback updates, multiple attempts, and Blackboard

by Glenn Rice -

When grades are passed back when an answer is submitted, it does not go through the job queue.  Those grade passbacks occur imediately, and complete by the time the page is rendered again for the student.  So those will not ever show up on the job manager page.

It sound like you might have an issue with corruption of the job queue database.  This happened for Alex a while ago too (at least that is what I think was his problem).  One solution for this is rather simple.  Just delete the database file, and then restart both the job queue and the webwork2 app.  The file is the DATA/webwork2_job_queue.db in the webwork root directory.  The file will be recreated as needed, and doesn't hold any data that needs to be saved.  It only holds jobs in the queue, and so that will clear the queue.

After doing that, try manually queuing a mass grade pass back from the "LTI Grade Update" page, and then check on that job on the "Job Manager Page".

If the sqlite job queue database corruption occurs frequently, then there are other options.  You could switch to using a mysql database for that instead.  I can help you with setting that up if it comes to it.

Grade passback updates, multiple attempts, and Blackboard

by Wesley Burr -
Great catch, thanks. Clearing the job queue seems to have made the response instantaneous, and the job I queued went through instantly.

I'll check in with the faculty member and report back if this fixes it or not.