Delete Progress Tutorial
From TeacherWiki
The ASSISTment website is built and maintained by a small and ever-changing group of WPI graduate and undergraduate students. The program is funded entirely by government grants and is available for everyone to use completely free of charge. As a result, resources are extremely limited, and as ASSISTment grows in use and expands beyond simply a research vehicle to a product used by thousands of teachers and students, those resources are stretched even thinner. We are working on some long term strategies we believe will help solve this issue, but in the meantime some of its effects will be felt by you, the end users, in the form of various bugs and glitches throughout the system. We apologize for any inconvenience these problems cause; just know that we work tirelessly to fix them as soon as you report them to us. All we ask is that you be patient with us and not get too frustrated.
We set up this wiki page to help address one of the most common and most frustrating bugs in the system. We are working hard to fix it, but it is quite elusive, and until we do we have setup a method by which teachers can get around this bug. We have outlined this solution here. First, though, a description of the problem:
Problem: While doing an assignment, a student encounters an error similar to the one in the picture below:
A variety of problems can cause this error message--what distinguishes this problem from the others is that, even if the student exits the assignment and attempts to try it again, the same message comes up every time, and he or she is permanently prevented from finishing the assignment.
Solution: We set up a temporary solution teachers can use to get around this problem. It is by no means ideal, but it is better than nothing until we figure out what the problem is and fix it. The problem itself is the result of a student's progress on the assignment being corrupted, sort of like a file on your computer can become corrupted and can no longer be opened. The solution is to delete the student's progress on the assignment in question. This will cause ASSISTment to think the student never even started the assignment, and he or she will have to start from the beginning. The student will lose all of their work (on that particular assignment), but at least they will be able to continue.
To delete a student's progress, click on the Assess tab and click on the Reports link next to the class that contains the student in question. This will bring you to the Item Report, but we want the Assignment Report. You can get to it by clicking on the link in the list of reports at the top of the Item Report page (see pictures):
The Assignment Report displays a table similar to a gradebook, with students as rows, their assignments as columns, and their grades on those assignments in the cells. The report is a bit outdated and cumbersome, especially if you have assigned a lot of problem sets (we are currently working on revamping the Assignment Report). Right above the table you will notice a red link titled "Delete Progress Mode." Clicking this link (may take a few seconds) will cause a link to appear in each cell of the table that corresponds to an assignment a student has worked on. This link will be titled "Delete Progress." If you click on one of these links, it will delete the progress of the particular student on the particular assignment that correspond to the cell in the table. For example, let's say Jon Smith is stuck on the assignment "Fraction Multiplication" because of the aforementioned bug in ASSISTments. To delete his progress, I would click on the red link above the table. I would then find Jon's row in the table and then find the column of the "Fraction Multiplication" assignment. Once I find the cell in the table where they meet (which will contain Jon's current grade on the assignment, with a half-moon symbol denoting he is still in progress), I would click on the "Delete Progress" link, click OK on the warning, and wait and watch as the half-moon symbol turns into a white circle, denoting that he has not started the assignment. This means the system now thinks he has not started the assignment at all. He will have lost all previous work on that assignment, but now at least he can complete it without getting stuck.
Deleting a student's progress is a pretty blunt solution and the ability to do so was only put there for these types of "emergency" situations. Some teachers have taken to using this as a "feature," for example deleting student progresses if they do an unsatisfactory job on an assignment and making them do it again. While you can certainly do that we recommend against it, as this was not designed to be a robust feature but rather an extreme fix.
