What Happens if Students Go Offline During an Assessment?

This article describes the student experience when they go offline during an assessment.

When students go offline in EXAMIND's assessment room, they can, for the most part continue working on their assessment without any worry. When offline, we queue up their changes in the background and automatically save them to the server when they reconnect. Other than seeing a small notification in their assessment room, they won't notice anything. Here's a visual of the notifications:

If a student remains offline when they submit their assessment, one of 3 things happen:

If they come back online before the exam ends, everything gets submitted before the time limit allotted and everything is fine.
If they come back online but it's after the exam ends, then the changes they made while offline is not "committed" to their assessment at first, but EXAMIND Support receives a notification. We then examine their logs, and if nothing nefarious happened, we backport all of their changes and "commit" them to their assessment. We usually do this within a few hours of receiving the notification.
If the student tries to close their browser before they come back online, they will receive this warning:

If the student ignores the warning and closes the browser anyways, there's no way for us to know what changes happened while they were offline, so unfortunately, this is the one scenario where their changes while offline will be lost. This is an unfortunate outcome, but very rare. This can be prevented by asking students to leave their browser open until they come back online.

Student Submits Assessment While Offline

If the student is offline when they submit their assessment and there are unsaved changes, the submit dialog will change to this:

After 10 seconds it will change to this

At any time during this waiting period, if the student tries to close their browser, they will see the same warning as above:

Student Runs Out of Time While Offline

If the student runs out of time while offline and there are unsaved changes, the "time ran out" dialog will change to this:

At any time during this waiting period, if the student tries to close their browser, they will see the same warning as above:

Student Shuts Down Computer While Offline

If the student shuts down the computer while offline, there is a chance that the student won't receive the browser warning that they risk losing data. We found this problem to be more prevalent on computers running Windows than macOS. Regardless of the operating system used, it is advisable to ask students not to attempt a computer shutdown until they receive confirmation that their assessment has been submitted successfully.