Crashes in exam mode

Josef Zoller shared this question 2 years ago

Answered

Hello,

Yesterday, I had a trial run of my maths exam which is coming up in late April. I used GeoGebra as my calculator for that but unfortunately GeoGebra crashed three times during the four and a half hours.

Normally that would not be that big of a deal, but in exam mode it's a bit different. Because it blocks the whole computer, I had to reboot it, restart GeoGebra and reenable the exam mode, all while the exam supervisor stood behind me and watched that I don't go into the Internet or something like this. Because of the crashes I lost at least half an hour of my time.

If I remember correctly, all three crashes happened while using the Maximize command with a rather complex equation. If it helps, I'm using GeoGebra Classic 6 from the macOS AppStore (so version 6.0.620).

But the point of this post is not that I want a bug fixed with the Maximize command (of course that would be nice) but rather that crashes should really be prevented from happening at all, especially in exam mode. If someone forwards this to the developers, I would suggest that one possible way of doing that (at least in exam mode, where crashing is really bad) could be to actually separate each calculation into a subprocess so that the main app keeps being responsive and maybe could terminate the subprocess, if it is taking too long.

Regards,

Josef Zoller

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Comments (4)

Simona Riva ● 2 years ago

Can you please post a file that creates issues?

Which is your version of iOS?

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Josef Zoller ● 2 years ago

As I couldn't save my calculations because GeoGebra crashed, I don't have any files where it happened. I tried to recreate it but I don't have the exact numbers and I haven't gotten it to crash again. As I said, I'm using GeoGebra on the Mac (macOS 11.2.1).

But again: this exact crash when using the Maximize command isn't my main concern. I have now found a way to do my calculations, where I can avoid this command. My real concern is, that there could always be some calculation that could just randomly crash GeoGebra inside exam mode which means the loss of really valuable time and previous calculations.

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Michael Borcherds ● 2 years ago

that crashes should really be prevented from happening at all,

Of course that's our aim, but it's not possible to guarantee that. Sorry

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Josef Zoller ● 2 years ago

I'm not suggesting that you 'just' program bug and crash free. From my own experience as a hobby programmer I know very well, that this is an impossible thing to do. But there certainly are ways to separate the main app from the calculations, so that the main app can terminate a crashed calculation and maybe at least the time counter of the exam mode keeps running. It would probably cost a bit of performance but maybe that is acceptable in exam mode when it's traded with safety. Of course I cannot know, how much work it would be, to incorporate that into GeoGebra, but if it's really your aim, then maybe it's worth considering.

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