Question shows "Score not updated. Submissions are Closed." even when assignment is "active." Score updates or does not update intermittently.

[dan-miller]

What Course are you in
CSAwesome

What Page were you on
Custom Assignment Page

What is your username
mr_miller

Describe the bug
I was able to duplicate the issue that many students in my class had. After clicking "Save & Run" or "Check Me" the question box displays "Score not updated. Submissions are closed." Even if it is within the due date and/or "allow late submissions" is checked. The score appears to update most of the time. Intermittently, however (I have not been able to discern the pattern), the score will not update. In an attempt to debug the score not updating on the student machine, I had them log out and log back in, and they lost all the progress on the assignment. All the coding exercises had reset to their initial state with no history, and all the multiple choice questions had reset to no answer selected.

It may or may not be related but on a current assignment I have the due date set to Wednesday, September 11, 23:59, and the assignment page is showing: Due: Wed 11, Sep 2024 11:09 PM.

There were no errors or issues visible from the debug console.

[bnmnetp]

You cannot be an instructor for the CSAwesome course. That course is open to all students. What course did you create for your students.

Runestone does not delete things. 99.9% of the time these problems end up being students in the wrong course, or not logged in correctly, or the assignment was set up incorrectly.

I'm happy to look deeper, but need the correct information.

Depending on the timing, this could also have a byproduct of the ongoing DDoS today.

[bnmnetp]

Fixed by #1324

[bnmnetp]

Following up now that the fix has shipped, since this was closed without the cause being written down.

The intermittency was real and had a specific explanation. assignments.duedate was stored as a naive datetime in course-local wall clock time, while the scoring path compared it against UTC. For a US course that makes an assignment due at 11:59 PM start reporting as closed several hours early — hence "Score not updated. Submissions are closed." on an assignment that was still open, and hence it looking intermittent: whether it failed depended on what time of day the student was working relative to the course's UTC offset. It also explains the odd due time you saw rendered on the assignment page.

#1324 stores due dates in UTC and converts only for display, which fixes the comparison. It also displays them on the reader's own clock with a timezone label.

The other half of your report — a student logging out and back in and losing their work — is a separate thing and almost certainly a second account: answers are cached in the browser per email address, so signing in under a different identity shows an empty page even though the work is still on the server. #459 covers the underlying local-vs-server question.

Thanks for the detailed report; the "sometimes it updates, sometimes it doesn't" observation was the useful clue.

[pearcej]

@dan-miller Are you using LTI integration? I have had students accidentally make a second account not knowing it was actually a second account because of the LTI integration.