Accessing and Interpreting Student Attempt Logs

Faculty and support staff can view detailed attempt logs for submissions from their students in Blackboard. This article details how to access and interpret the logs.

Accessing Attempt Logs

Use the following steps to view the attempt logs for a single submission from a single student:

1. Open the course containing the student submission

2. Navigate to Gradebook → Gradable Items - OR - Gradebook → Students.

3. If using Gradable Items view in the gradebook, find the student the submission is from

4. If using Students view in the gradebook, find the assignment/assessment from the student

5. Click on the “…” (ellipsis) menu to the right of the submission

6. Click Attempt Log to view the attempt log

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This video shows how to access the attempt logs through both the Gradable Items and Students view

Interpreting Attempt Logs

Key Points

Selecting an answer triggers a “saved” event.

• If a student selects an answer and then clears it, the log records “Saved, Left”blank

• Simply scrolling, opening a dropdown, or clicking into a field without selecting an answer does not generate a log entry.

• Therefore, any question showing “Saved” indicates the student did choose an answer at some point.

• Why timer-per-question

Saved

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This image shows 3 questions that were saved by a student

Saved Left Blank

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This image shows a question that was left blank by a student

What generates a “Saved” event?

For Ultra assessments set to All questions at once, the activity log records a save event
each time a student selects an answer.

Why timer-per-question values may appear extremely low

For question types with very fast interactions (for example, True/False or Multiple Choice),
selecting an answer can occur in less than a second. Because of this, you may see 0 or 1
second recorded for Timer Per Question even though an answer was selected. This is
expected.

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This image shows a Saved event with fast interactions (<= 1 second)

Submitted vs. Auto Submitted

• If the student submits the assessment themselves, the log records Submitted.

• If the student closes the browser, loses connection, or the timer/due date expires, the system completes the attempt and records Auto Submitted.

• No additional log events appear after loss of connection or browser closure; Ultra simply finalizes the attempt when the time condition is met.

Manual Saves

Ultra assessments do not support question-level manual saving.

• The only instructor-facing manual action is “Save and Close”, which does not create an entry in the activity log.

• The log only reflects automatic system-generated save events tied to answer selections.

Interpreting “Saved Multiple Times”

This appears when a question type allows multiple answers. For example, matching
questions. Each time the student selects or deselects an option, Ultra records a new save
event.

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This image shows 3 questions that were saved multiple times

Visibility of selected answers

Because the log only records events tied to answer selection, any question marked as
Saved should have an associated answer in the submitted attempt, even if the final
submission was auto-submitted.