Scheduled and past changes that may require action from administrators are listed below. We will announce these changes in advance to allow administrators plenty of time to make the required changes.

Scheduled changes

15th of October 2023 - The option to enable the guess correction by default to unanswered questions will be added to the school settings
In the release of September 17th, we added a new setting to the guess correction, which allows the correction to be disabled for unanswered questions. This setting was only added to the assignment settings in the Mark calculation tab.

On the 15th of October, the setting will also be added to the school settings. This means that administrators can decide to enable the setting by default for newly created assignments.

For any schools that join Ans after the 15th of October 2023, the setting will already be enabled by default in the school settings.

12th of November - We remove the possibility for employees to access the answers of participants before a digital test has been submitted from the "Monitor participants during a digital test" beta feature
Based on our investigation, this option is not in line with the European GDPR laws. Other than this, the beta feature will stay unchanged. If you have any questions, please refer to your Customer Success Manager.

Past changes

• Fill-in question (if the ‘show answer’ option is enabled)
• Multiple choice (both one correct answer and multiple answers)
• Match
• Order
  
  

6th of August 2023 - The option for students to set up 2FA on their account will be disabled
Based on feedback from multiple customers, we will remove the option for students to enable 2FA on their own account. Since most schools use Single Sign On, which in some cases already uses 2FA, it is redundant for students to set up 2FA in Ans. In addition, 2FA can cause issues during live tests as students need access to their phones to sign in.

23rd of April 2023 - Scan issues will no longer be flagged, but will be marked as ungraded
For written assignments, Ans can detect issues while detecting the answers on multiple choice questions. Up until the release of the 23rd of April, Ans will flag all situations where an issue is detected. From the release of the 23rd of April onwards, we will no longer flag any multiple choice question. Instead, Ans will mark them as 'ungraded'. The reason for this is that many of our users have indicated that solving a flag in a written assignment takes a lot of unnecessary time and clicks. To improve this process, we have decided to mark all unrecognised multiple choice questions answers as ungraded starting from the 23rd of April. 

In this way, users will not have to both solve flags and correct multiple choice questions, but only correct the unrecognised multiple choice questions, which saves clicks per situation. It also makes it easier to distinguish (important) manually created flags from automatic scanning flags.

We are aware that this change makes the distinction between scanning flags and to-be-graded open questions less clear. However, the multiple choice questions can still be corrected per exercise via the same page as before. Additionally, we also understand that the error messages that are shown in the flags will no longer be visible. The advantage of having less clicks per unrecognised scan outweighs the textual explanation of the error which is also visible during grading.

23rd of April 2023 - Assignment integrations can no longer be disabled by sending "{}" as the value through the API
On assignment level, Ans provides several integrations which can be managed via the API. Sometimes, you would like to disable an integration via a PATCH request. At this moment it is possible to disable an integration with "{}" and with the value "null". Following best practices, we have decided to change the way integrations are disabled via the API. From the release of the 23rd of April onwards it will only be possible to disable an integration with the "null" value. The "{}" value can only be used to turn on the integration with the default integration settings.

{
  ..,
  "integrations": {
    "ouriginal": {}
  },
  ...
}

{
  ...,
  "integrations": {
    "ouriginal": null
  },
  ...
}

7th of April 2023 - Adjustment to timing of release on stage environment
Currently, our release cycle consists of three stages carried out over a three week period. This means that every three weeks a new version of the platform is deployed on our production environment. One week prior to the production release, the new version is deployed on our stage environment.

Based on your feedback, we are going to extend the time that the new version of the platform is on the stage environment. It will be extended to two weeks. This will allow users more time to check the new version and to provide feedback. To give you more insight, we have included a visual below which includes the schedule of the timing of the upcoming releases on both the stage- and production environments. The first release on the stage environment with the updated timing is marked in red and will take place on the 7th of April (instead of the 14th of April).

12th of March 2023 - Restrictions to the amount of users that can be added to a group or class
In pre release of February 10th 2023, we announced that we had added a restriction of 1000 users in a group and class. Based on your feedback, we have decided to delay this change to the release which will be deployed on the 12th of march 2023. 

This is what can now be expected instead:

• On the release of the 19th of February, the limit will be set to 50.000 students per group to prevent any issues from happening in that release.
• During the release scheduled on the 12th of March the limit will be reduced.
• From your feedback, we found that the amount of 1000 students was not enough, so we have reconsidered the limitations. The following limits will apply from the 12th of March 2023 onwards:
  • 2500 students per group
  • 1000 students per class

12th of March 2023 - Step by step guides removed from the Help center
Currently, our help centre consists of instruction articles for administrators, employees and students. It also includes step by step guides for employees and students. We have already stopped updating the step by step guides as we are focusing on improving and restructuring the instruction articles. On the 12th of March 2023, the step by step guides will be removed from our Help Center. 

12th of March 2023 - Update date and time format in export files 
We are changing the current exports that contain date time fields. The datetime fields will be made consistent by using the ISO6801 format (2022-12-31T19:19:19+01:00)
A consistent export format will make it easier for users to process exports in an automated way. We will change it in the release of March 12th 2023.

19th of February 2023 - CSV Import replacement to the Respondus format
The CSV import feature based on Respondus has been deployed in the release of the 8th of January 2023. As the CSV import based on Respondus is still under development and can’t replace the old CSV import yet, both features will stay available at least 1 release more. The replacement has been delayed until the 19th of February, however the documentation for the CSV import based on Respondus has been improved and can be found here. The multiple choice and fill-in question types are supported. The import template is not yet available during the pre-release. It will be added as soon as possible. Until that time, you can manually create a .CSV file with the instructions in the support article.

19th of February 2023 -  All trashed data older than 180 days will be permanently deleted
From the 19th of February 2023, we will start removing all data that has been trashed by users, that is older than 180 days. This means removed results, assignments, courses, users and question banks will be recoverable for a maximum of 180 days. This is in line with best practices from other SaaS platforms handling user generated data.

If deleted data is trashed and it is deleted after 180 days, it will automatically delete connected elements as well. For example, if a user is trashed and deleted we also delete the results of that user if the user has any result are deleted as well.

Please note, that users that are currently trashed will not be permanently deleted with retroactive effect. This means that only if users are thrashed after the release of February 19th, the 180 day counter will start. For now, these currently trashed users will remain trashed but will not be permanently deleted, including their results. For the next release, we will align closer with our users to investigate the boundaries and impact of the feature. We do aim to go through with this change in the long run, however we want to better understand the implications first.

This change does not impact any data stored by tools we are integrated with. For example, if you are making use of an integration with a proctoring tool, that tool is also saving data of your users. We do not delete any information that is stored by the proctoring tool.

29th of January 2023 - Added 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net' to the list of URL's that should be whitelisted
The supplier of tool we use for the emoji support is redirecting users to a different CDN. We advise schools to whitelist https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/. You can find the complete overview of URL's that you should whitelist here.

29th of January 2023 - The way question bank assignments are generated when the tag filter is used will be changed
Currently, the behaviour of generating question bank assignments based on a blueprint is different for a randomised assignment compared with an assignment with a fixed order per participant. At this moment we exclude exercises without tags if the tag filters are active in case you are generating a question bank assignment with a fixed order per participant. To make the behaviour consistent with the randomised question selection, we will no longer exclude questions without tags. We will change this in the release of January 29th 2023.

If you are not using tag filters while generating question bank assignments, the change will have no impact on the generating of question bank assignments.

29th of January 2023 - The order of the name in generated PDF's for classes will be changed in the next release
With the 29th of January 2023 release, the pdf name of generated forms will change. The same data will be available in the file but shown in a different order.

The current order: [class]-[form position]-[student number]-[student name].pdf

Will be changed to: [class]-[student name]-[form position]-[student number].pdf

This change allows for easier sorting the forms before printing. This change only has an impact if classes are used.

8th of January 2023 - External ID's will be removed on items that have been copied
In the previous release of December 18th 2022, we announced that we no longer copy the external id when copying an assignment. In the upcoming release of January 8th 2023, we will no longer copy the external_id for all other models with an external id. This will prevent objects with the same external id if an object is copied.

8th of January 2023 - Empty external ID when copying an assignment
From the 7th of January 2023 onwards, we are going to change the way external_id’s are used when an assignment is copied. At this moment, the external_id of the original assignment is being copied as well. As Ans has the philosophy that we never edit the external_id field, we will adjust this in the future. From the release of January 7th 2023, Ans will no longer fill the external_id in case an assignment is copied.

1st of January 2023 - Deprecation of API V1
The API V2 has been released out of beta. The API V1 is deprecated and will be removed on the 1st of January 2023. We encourage institutions that are not yet doing so, to start using the API V2. The documentation for the API V1 has been removed from the platform.

3rd of September 2022 - Combined timeslot date & time into one DateTime field
Assignment timeslots and publication timeslots will have some attributes removed as of September 3rd 2022. Until then, these attributes can still be used as well as the new attributes. At the moment, we have separate attributes for date and time, which causes some confusion with time zones. To address this confusion we have combined the separate date and time fields into one date-time field. 

For more changes see the API V2 documentation.

3rd of July 2022 -The following attributes are deprecated in API V2
With the previous release of July 3rd 2022, all relation ids from list actions were removed. This change will only affect the response from list actions where an array of records were returned. There was no impact on show or patch/put requests for single records. The affected endpoints and relation_ids were:

/api/v2/question_banks/{question_bank_id}/question_bank_exercises - assignment_ids

/api/v2/question_banks/{question_bank_id}/question_bank_assignments - exercise_ids

/api/v2/courses/{course_id}/assignments - location_ids

/api/v2/schools/{school_id}/departments - operator_ids

/api/v2/question_banks - publisher_ids and author_ids

/api/v2/schools/{school_id}/courses - study_ids and period_ids

/api/v2/schools/{school_id}/classes - user_ids

/api/v2/courses/{course_id}/groups - user_ids

3rd of July 2022 -The X-Frame-Options header will be enabled again
With the last release of July 3rd, the X-Frame-Options security header was enabled again. The X-Frame-Options header prevents Ans from being embedded inside an iFrame which protects Ans against clickjacking attacks. We disabled this option in order for Proctorio to work, however, Proctorio has now added an option to run Proctorio on our own domain, which allows us to enable the header again.

From now on, Ans will no longer be rendered inside another website which will most likely only affect LMS. To keep using Ans in combination with an LMS, administrators must select the option inside their LMS to launch Ans in a new window.