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Can somebody please explain what happened in this instance?

A student claims that she submitted her assignment document prior to the assignment's due date.

In the Assignment Dropbox, under the "Submitted" tab, the "Submitted Date" column is blank for this student. In the "Due Date" column, I see "Missed" in bold letters beside the due date.

In the Assignment Dropbox, under the "All" tab, the "Status" column shows "Submitted". But the "Due Date" column shows "Missed" in bold letters just as it does under the "Submitted" tab.

In the Assignment Dropbox, under the "Not Submitted" tab, I see this message: "There are currently no Submissions for this view."

If I attempt to review the student's submission, I see "Status: Missed" near the top of the page, whereas further down under "Submission" I see "Attachments None".

However, if I go into "Tracking" and generate a report for this particular student, I see that she accessed the Assignments tool prior to the assignment's due date. The action for that event is "Assignment Read".

The very next event in the tracking report involved the File Manager tool. The action is "File uploaded". I can see the file's name in the "Item" column; it was the student's assignment document.

There is no "Assignment submitted" event for this student. This would seem to be the problem, since there is an "Assignment Submitted" event for every other student.

Thus, I have many questions:

What happened?
When the student went to submit her assignment, did she click "Add Attachment" but forget to click "Submit"? Did she click "Save as Draft"? (she believes she did everything correctly)

Where did the student's assignment document go?
If it was uploaded, then where is it? Can I access it? Can the student?

Why does the student's status show as both "missed" and "submitted" depending on where I look?
This is very confusing to me.

Thanks for the detailed information.

I can not answer all of your questions but I can some. My experience is as an Instructor of courses in Bb, and as a Bb Sys admin.

When a student missed the cut off date for the assignment, Blackboard automitically submits the assignment for them and assigns it the status of missed.

We have to believe that the student does believe that they did submit the assignment correctly, however we have seen instances where they did not click the submit button.

Where does the assignment go. There is a file manager area for students. Most of the time institutions turn this off, so you can not see it as a student. I have not seen it for some time as we have ours turned off. Prevents students from using Bb as a repository for everything, like mp3 files. Anyway if I recall (not 100 sure) when student uploads an file as an assignment it goes to the students file manager area or my files area for that student. Even when turned off from view or access, files still pass through there.

Kevin

Something else:
If the assignment deadline is extended (and extended again), what is the effect on submissions that were made prior to the original deadline?

Example:
An assignment is released to students. Half the class submits prior to the deadline, half the class misses the deadline. The deadline is extended and eventually everyone submits.

However, two students who submitted prior to the original deadline are now showing under the "Not Submitted" tab as "attempt 2", and they're also showing under the "All" tab as "in progress".

I can confirm that the two students did indeed submit their assignments prior to the original deadline, thanks to Vista's tracking reports, confirmation emails, and the assignment documents themselves that I batch downloaded prior to the deadline change.

So what exactly happened here? Am I wrong in assuming that the deadline change is the cause of this problem? If the deadline change did indeed cause this problem, then how come it only affected two students out of approximately 25 who submitted their assignments prior to the original deadline?

Blackboard Learning System - Vista Enterprise License (Release Vista 8.0.3) [18.0.3.74]

When an instructor hits the Save button after editing Assignment properties, there is a pop-up notice which says:

This assignment may already have submissions. Your changes will overwrite the original assignment. To avoid this, click Cancel and create a new assignment.

The meaning of this, to me, is everything in the assignment including submissions from students is lost by hitting OK.

That's what I used to think but it's definitely not the case because most of the original submissions remain intact.

Here's what I've concluded based on looking at the student tracking reports:

Some students submitted their assignments prior to the original deadline.

Then we extended the deadline because several students missed the original deadline (by changing the deadline we triggered the warning that Ezra mentions).

At some point after we extended the deadline, a few students who submitted prior to the original deadline went in and clicked the assignment link again.

By clicking the assignment link again, those students were effectively taking back their earlier submissions (“attempt 1”) and preparing new submissions (“attempt 2”).

However, those students didn’t bother to submit “attempt 2”, because they knew that they had already submitted their assignments prior to the original deadline.

Thus, by clicking the assignment link after the deadline extension, they were overwriting “attempt 1” with “attempt 2”, and by not submitting “attempt 2” they were leaving their submissions “in progress” indefinitely.

In future I'll modify the assignment's selective release before we change the deadline, to hide the assignment link for those students who submitted prior to the original deadline.

Either that or we should be more ruthless about enforcing the original deadline! We ended up creating a problem for some students who actually submitted their assignments on time.

I am not sure where to direct my question but i was not aware of the submit button I thought that emailing copies of my assignment to my teacher and myself was all I had to do and now my first 3 assignments in blackboard show missed and one shows late even though I did them on time? Do you know how I can fix this?

Hi Tamara.  See my reply at http://discussions.blackboard.com/forums/p/50202/157891.aspx#157891