Please note that the impact analysis for this incident is ongoing. We will continue to share updates in this article.
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Incident summary
An issue was identified where fill-in-the-gap questions did not correctly compare answers containing characters with accents when the Case sensitive option was disabled.
When Case sensitive was disabled, answers that differed only in letter casing should have been considered equal. However, for certain characters with accents, the comparison did not work correctly. For example, the correct answer "Álvaro" was not considered equal to the submitted answer "álvaro", even though they differ only in letter casing.
As a result, participants may have received an incorrect score and mark.
A hotfix for this issue was deployed on July 6, 2026, at 13:12. We are currently investigating the full impact of this issue.
Lead-up
On July 6, 2026, a user contacted Support after noticing that a fill-in-the-gap question incorrectly marked an answer as incorrect when the correct answer started with a capital accented letter, even though the same letter was submitted in lowercase and the Case sensitive option was disabled.
The reported behaviour was promptly investigated up by the technical team, who reproduced the issue using the example provided by the user. During the investigation, it was confirmed that answers containing characters with accents were not always recognised as equal when they differed only in letter casing.
Further investigation showed that this behaviour was caused by the implementation used for case-insensitive comparison, which did not correctly handle characters with accents. Once the cause had been identified, a hotfix was developed, reviewed and deployed to production.
Fault
Fill-in-the-gap questions support both case-sensitive and case-insensitive answer comparison through the Case sensitive option. When Case sensitive is disabled, answers that differ only in letter casing should be marked as equivalent.
The implementation responsible for this comparison did not correctly normalise characters with accents before comparing them. As a result, answers that should have been considered equivalent, such as "Álvaro" and "álvaro", were incorrectly marked as different.
As a result, participants could receive fewer points than intended for affected fill-in-the-gap questions.
Impact
We are currently investigating the impact of this issue.
The technical team is determining which assignments contain affected fill-in-the-gap questions and whether participant scores or marks were affected.
The affected schools will be informed once the complete impact has been determined.
Detection
The issue was reported by a user via a support ticket. The technical team investigated the reported behaviour, reproduced the issue, and identified the underlying cause.
Response
The technical team investigated the issue immediately after it was reported and identified the underlying cause. A hotfix was developed, reviewed, and deployed on July 6, 2026, at 13:12 to ensure the correct comparison behaviour for characters with accents.
Following the deployment, the technical team started a complete impact analysis to determine whether participant scores or marks were affected.
Recovery
A hotfix was deployed on July 6, 2026, at 13:12 to ensure that answers containing characters with accents are correctly compared when the Case sensitive option is disabled.
Following the deployment, newly calculated results are no longer affected by this issue.
The impact analysis is ongoing. Affected schools will be informed once the complete impact has been determined.
Timeline
The investigation is ongoing. A detailed timeline will be added once the impact analysis has been completed.
Reflection
A full reflection will be added once the incident has been fully resolved and the investigation into the root cause, impact, and corrective measures has been completed.
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