I know this relates to browser tabs not refreshing but it is a serious issue around grading the wrong students work via the Moodle assignment module.

What happens is if you have two tabs open in the browser and have the same or even a different assignment grading page open in each tab and then you also use the filtering in each tab (filter First Name) a problem can arise. One of our staff was uploading assignment response files to the wrong student by 'achieving' the following somewhat unorthodox behaviour.

Issue:

• Go into an assignment
• Click on View grade all assignments
• Open same page in a new tab
• On first tab filter First Name = S
• On second tab filter First Name = R (or different letter from first)
• Note that the second tab was the last page to load……URL is server/mod/assign/view.php?action=grading&id=2566&tifirst=R
• Click on Grade pencil next to first student in the list on second tab (mine is Rory). My URL is server/mod/assign/view.php?id=2566&rownum=0&action=grade and Rory’s grading page comes up. All Good! Leave this page as it is and…
• Click on first tab (notice this tab/page doesn’t refresh or reload. The filter still shows first name = S and the URL is server/mod/assign/view.php?action=grading&id=2566&tifirst=S
• Click on Grade pencil next to first student in the list on first tab (mine is Simone). Rory’s grading page comes up
  If I refresh this tab/page (first tab) before clicking on the Grade pencil then the correct students grading page comes up but if you switch between tabs and don’t manually refresh each tab the problem occurs as Moodle selects the first student rownum=0 from whatever tab was last loaded not the tab I am necessarily on.

Although it’s a browser problem shouldn’t Moodle have some check as it is to do with grading and when grading 100 students a teacher will quickly scroll down to add feedback files and not double checking the name is the same name as the one they selected next to the Grade pencil? The suggestion from the forums was to change this process and use student ID instead of row number in this type of situation if that is possible.

Discussion around this issue started in the Moodle forums:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=323530#p1300376