assignments: New format of honor pledge agreement logs and creates a draft submission, possibly also causing other errors
GENERAL
TESTING
GENERAL
TESTING
Description
The new format of the Honor pledge agreement in Assignments (student must press a button to agree to Honor pledge before accessing assignment rather than check a box to submit) creates an empty draft submission for each student and logs as if they have begun the assignment and saved a draft. That the student accessing the assignment "saved a draft" appears in the UI for both the student and instructor. For the student, when they access the assignment, the progress bar near the top of the screen makes it look like they've saved a draft. Similarly, if the instructor has Statistics included in their site, and they search for the student's activities in the User Activity tab, it looks like the student saved a draft.
Aside from the obvious problem of it seeming like the students have started the assignment when they haven't, we have found that draft submissions create other problems, for example SAK-45336. Students at UVA have encountered issues submitting some assignments late where they appeared to have saved drafts before the due date, but each affected assignment also had the Honor pledge enabled, so it’s not clear whether the students saved anything or not at the point where the logs indicate a draft was saved.
Example logs from my testing of two assignments (Note that there is no "asn.read.assignment" event associated with accessing the honor pledge assignment; asn.read.assignment is the expected event for a student accessing an assignment and not taking any other action on it):
Logs for accessing an assignment with Honor Pledge enabled:
Log for accessing an assignment with no Honor Pledge (the kind of log I expect to see on first access to an assignment): 2022-02-18 16:35:40.639 asn.read.assignment @ /assignment/a/567798b7-0b3a-4165-80e8-182506683881/e77d7396-b532-473c-8869-b57e58f95490
Accessing an assignment without saving any content as a draft should not behave the same as actually saving a draft. Furthermore, if the agreement to honor pledge must be logged, it should have a unique log entry, for example "asn.honor.agree". I would then expect to see two events upon accessing an assignment with honor pledge enabled for the first time:
The new format of the Honor pledge agreement in Assignments (student must press a button to agree to Honor pledge before accessing assignment rather than check a box to submit) creates an empty draft submission for each student and logs as if they have begun the assignment and saved a draft. That the student accessing the assignment "saved a draft" appears in the UI for both the student and instructor. For the student, when they access the assignment, the progress bar near the top of the screen makes it look like they've saved a draft. Similarly, if the instructor has Statistics included in their site, and they search for the student's activities in the User Activity tab, it looks like the student saved a draft.
Aside from the obvious problem of it seeming like the students have started the assignment when they haven't, we have found that draft submissions create other problems, for example SAK-45336. Students at UVA have encountered issues submitting some assignments late where they appeared to have saved drafts before the due date, but each affected assignment also had the Honor pledge enabled, so it’s not clear whether the students saved anything or not at the point where the logs indicate a draft was saved.
Example logs from my testing of two assignments (Note that there is no "asn.read.assignment" event associated with accessing the honor pledge assignment; asn.read.assignment is the expected event for a student accessing an assignment and not taking any other action on it):
Logs for accessing an assignment with Honor Pledge enabled:
2022-02-18 16:32:09.812 asn.read.submission @ /assignment/s/567798b7-0b3a-4165-80e8-182506683881/6bad6512-feae-487d-8e9d-abe97ea452e4/34d43266-8a81-4ae7-96ae-f6866feb7b75
2022-02-18 16:32:09.797 asn.save.submission @ /assignment/s/567798b7-0b3a-4165-80e8-182506683881/6bad6512-feae-487d-8e9d-abe97ea452e4/34d43266-8a81-4ae7-96ae-f6866feb7b75
2022-02-18 16:32:09.792 asn.revise.submission @ /assignment/s/567798b7-0b3a-4165-80e8-182506683881/6bad6512-feae-487d-8e9d-abe97ea452e4/34d43266-8a81-4ae7-96ae-f6866feb7b75
2022-02-18 16:32:09.786 asn.new.submission @ /assignment/s/567798b7-0b3a-4165-80e8-182506683881/6bad6512-feae-487d-8e9d-abe97ea452e4/34d43266-8a81-4ae7-96ae-f6866feb7b75
Log for accessing an assignment with no Honor Pledge (the kind of log I expect to see on first access to an assignment): 2022-02-18 16:35:40.639 asn.read.assignment @ /assignment/a/567798b7-0b3a-4165-80e8-182506683881/e77d7396-b532-473c-8869-b57e58f95490
Accessing an assignment without saving any content as a draft should not behave the same as actually saving a draft. Furthermore, if the agreement to honor pledge must be logged, it should have a unique log entry, for example "asn.honor.agree". I would then expect to see two events upon accessing an assignment with honor pledge enabled for the first time:
asn.read.assignment
asn.honor.agree