Troubleshooting Issues

If you're here, something is probably going wrong with your interactions with our tools.  It's frusterating, we get it.  Most issues we have encountered center around the various configurations and tools schools employ on their student's devices.  The hard part is, there are many combinations of possible issues.  This page is to help you diagnose possible issues, and report the information we can use to hopefully come up with more work arounds.

First know, we here at Physics Classroom are focused on customer experience and success.  We care, and want to make things work well. 

Secondly, know that we are working to rebuild the entire site to make it faster and more streamlined (estimated early 2025), and eventually make our task system more robust and failure proof (estimated late 2025, early 2026).  However, we appreciate your patience as we have prices set so low to help our teachers, we do operate on a very tight budget and with limited resources.

Verify Issue on Device vs. Website Issue

Before we dive into the various issues and solutions, almost all of these revolve around School Issued devices, extensions, and school networks.  Doing homework at home, on a non-school device, not on safari, and in incognito mode (so your own extensions are disabled) should eliminate all the possible issues at home that could be causing crashes.  This is a good way to test to see if there is indeed an issue with the website, vs. your device.  The below will go over possible device level issues and their remedies.

Issue 1: Getting Logged Out

Like most sites that log you in, when you log in the website provides you with a cookie that contains your current session.  When communicating back and forth on the website, this cookie is passed back and forth to verify who you are.  

• School Blocking Cookies: One possible issue is that schools may be blocking, or deleting your cookies.  If this happens, you'll be logged out repeatedly.  We had one school district who had cookies disabled for a student and that was the problem.
• Opening in a different browser/closing browser: Session cookies are of the duration 'session' which means if you close your browser windows, that session is over and the sessions cookies go away.  Additionally, opening in Incognito Mode, opening in a different browser, or even a new window of the same browser may not carry the session over.
• Single Sign On Continual Prompt: If you use the Google Single Sign On, your school often will only allow certain sites to leverage this for your school account.  Even though you 'sign in' it may not actually sign you in.  Likewise, if you do sign in but the cookies are being lost, it may ask to sign you in over and over again (often refreshing the page each time you attempt to sign in).  The solution is to have the school's IT department add our Client ID to their allowed apps.  Have them contact us and we'll provide it.  Additionally you can try logging in with your normal username/password and not use the Google Single Sign On, this seems to bypass the issue as well.
• Disconnect: If you lose connection during doing the task, it may not be able to log your activity.
• Server Restart: Once a week (usually friday evening) we will do a code push which causes a restart and may lose your session.  The future rebuild of the site will not have this issue.

Issue 2: Browser Crashes - Ads

Oh Snap!  The browser crashed, right as you were in the middle of an assignment.  We hear this a lot.  It almost always resolves around Ads.

No one loves ads, but they are the only way we can provide the site free to the general public, and at a tremendous discount to teachers for the Task Tracker (the Ad-Supported accounts are half the cost of the normal accounts).  However, if anything tries to remove, block, or alter these ads, it often ends in a crash.

The "Fix All" for this is to simply get the Ad Supported subscription for the students ($2 per student), or Ad-Free for yourself ($3).  However, there may be ways listed below to keep Ad-Supported and still fix the problems.

• Whitelist the Ad Servers: One school was able to remedy the issues by adding whitelist (allowed domains) rules for the Ad network, this allowed the Ads to be served and stopped crashes.
• Configure Extensions Properly: Some extensions (such as GoGaurdian) try to block Ads and need to be configured to stop it on our site.  This will often also require the IT department.
• Incognito Mode: Most schools block this, but if you can open in Incognito mode, that usually disables extensions.  Usually.
• Just Get Ad Free: Sometimes it's just easier to just purcahse Ad-Free for yourself ($3) or have your subscription upgraded to Ad-Free ($2 per student).  We can also run a trial to see if adding Ad-Free fixes your issues for your class before you purchase.

Issue 3: Refreshing IFrames

Most of our Concept Builders, Concept Checkers, Minds on Physics and Science Reasoning center are shown in an iFrame (a 'window' within a window).  These currently are compiled, exported HTML modules which makes it very difficult to display them outside of an iFrame currently.  Here's some issues around this and possible solutions.

• Safari: Safari doesn't like iFrames.  Why, we don't know, maybe iFrames are basically Windows, and we know Apple hates Windows.  Try using Chrome browser on your Apple device. 
• Bad Internet: Some devices, if they disconnect, will refresh the page when reconnected.  This of course can be very bad when you're in the middle of a Concept Builder.  Make sure you have a stable internet connection.
• Extensions: Again, browser extensions can sometimes cause issues, especially those that try to modify websites to make them more accessible by altering the site makeup.  Disabling these or trying Incognito mode can help.

Issue 4: Logged in, but Task isn't Tracking

This one isn't a technological issue as much as it's a procedural issue.  As long as you are logged in and stay logged in, assignments will track properly, but here's some possible issues.

• Teacher Assigned Wrong Assignment: There are some assignments which have a Physics and a Chemistry version.  We've seen it before where the teacher assigned the Chemistry version, then told the class to go to the Physics version on the website.  The solution is both for the Teacher to make sure they assign the proper assignment, as well as for students to always launch tasks from their Tasks and Classes page (which only shows tasks assigned, and provides the proper Start This Task link).
• CalcPad not launched through My Classes and Tasks: CalcPad is unique in that it has a Public version and a Course Version of the assignments.  Each class, when assigning a CalcPad, generates a unique identifier for that assignment.  You must go through your My Classes and Tasks - Start This Task in order for any CalcPad to be graded.
• Internet Disconnect: Like most things, if your interent drops when it tries to send a completion or answer, it won't be able to track that.  You will usually see an error popup though if this is the case.
• MoP/Concept Checker - Marathan Mode: When doing Minds on Physics and Concept Checkers, if you do not use sudden death mode it will not track scores.  There is a popup that warns you if you click marathan mode that it won't score, this sometimes gets ignored.

Help Us Diagnose

If you are encountering issues, or did encounter issues and found out the reason why, please use the form below to give us some feedback so we can further help find and fix problems.  Thank you.