Thursday, October 12, 2006
Data snafu in Samigo
We recently had a problem with Samigo that looked like a crisis at first. A professor had just given his second test of the semester, a timed essay — just one question. The trouble was, Samigo showed all scores from the first test and submitted them to the gradebook as such, so students were seeing scores that didn’t make any sense, and since the professor couldn’t see their responses to the new test, he thought they were gone which would be muy malo.
Luckily for us and this modest effort to migrate to Sakai, the test answers were not gone, just weirdly mis-recorded. It’s not easy to debug this, because it involves a lot of digging in Samigo’s tables, which are big and numerous and kind of inscrutable. For instance, there’s two of everything: the template version and then the published version. But the foreign keys that refer to things will just say, like SECTIONID. How do I know if that’s the SAM_SECTION_T or the SAM_PUBLISHEDSECTION_T? A little bit of context and a lot of trial and error.
It turned out that the responses for test 2 had been recorded with the wrong assessment id. I didn’t figure out how this could have happened; I just fixed the data.
The other thing that was wonky is that the rows in SAM_ASSESSMENTGRADING_T all had a submit date, but did not have an attempt date, which caused all the students to have “No Submission” show up next to their names. Once I figured that out, it was easy to fix, but again with the trial and error.
