Community release notes - 7.6.0

Requirements

7.6.0

Upgrading notes

A new setting cfg_site_address has been added to ExamSys, it should be set to the full path to your ExamSys installation. We require it to be set during upgrade, if you are doing a command line upgrade you can avoid being prompted for it by using the -s flag, for example:

php cli\upd.php -u username -p password -s https://examsys.example.com

There is also a new script that should be configured to run regularly that will e-mail anomaly reports out:

cli/mail.php

New features

• ExamSys now supports and require PHP 8.1

• Staff can now add notes to questions (thanks to Get John)

• You can now optionally see the history of changes to previous instances of a question (thanks to Get John)

• PHP mailer can be used to configure e-mail

• Incorrect answers can now be added to hotspots (thanks to Get John)

• Hotspot and extended matching questions can now be globally configured to display the option letter, rather than the co-ordinate in hotspots, or the option value in extended matching questions (thanks to Get John)

• Anomaly detection. ExamSys will now record potentially suspicious activity happening on a paper that can be reviewed by administrators if cheating is suspected on an exam.

Improvements

• There should be improved clarity around the validity of the duration shown on the class totals report when a user has late log entries

• The System information administration page now flows better and displays information about the status of ExamSys data directories

• Information about IP address problems in labs should now provide more clarity to administrators

• The command line install scripts will now send better exit codes when something goes wrong

Bug fixes

• CSV reports should not break when an extended matching question contains multiple answers

• Fixed a crash when adding a random question to a paper that you are not a team member on

• Fixed various bugs caused by a race condition between the page loading and JavaScript initialising on a page (this presented as pages sometimes working and sometimes not working correctly)

• The fail save timeout now works as intended again (this should ensure that if something goes wrong it fails more quickly)

• The previous attempts link will now only display if a student has at least one previous attempt on a paper

• Banners should save more reliably

Behind the scenes

• Made it harder for there to be issues with exam times when PHP and the database are not configured to use the same timezone

• Removed code that linked to a decommissioned University of Nottingham system from ExamSys

You may view all the tickets in the release