Please help us test this: automatic submission of answers

[Christian Lawson-Perfect]

Hi everyone,

One of the most common complaints we get from students is that they forgot to press the "Submit part" button, so their answers weren't marked. While the Numbas LTI tool allows us to go back and mark these unsubmitted answers, it's an annoyingly time-consuming process.

We've been thinking for a long time about how to avoid this problem. We've tried a variety of measures to remind students to press the button, and to prevent them from moving on if they haven't submitted their answers, but we've always had an eye on the other option: to automatically submit and mark answers without any explicit action by the student.

This is really hard to get right: we need students to be confident that they understand when their answers will be marked, and ideally to make it impossible for a student to enter an answer and not have it marked. There are accessibility considerations around how we give feedback, if it appears without the student actively asking for it.

Laura and I have spent some time over the last week working on implementing automatic submission and we think it's now at a point where it feels better than the status quo. This would be a big change to how Numbas works, so I want to get as much feedback on it as I can.

I've made a copy of the main Numbas demo exam and compiled it with this new feature, online at

https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/christian.perfect/numbas/automatic-submission-2024-05-29/

Please give it a go, and tell us what you think, either here or on the GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/numbas/Numbas/issues/783

Thanks!

Christian