Skip to main content

​
Audit Log

Course Settings → Audit Log is a read-only table of record-by-record changes to your course’s data: who changed what, when, and from which IP address. The menu entry is instructor-only, and the page lives at /course/<course_id>/manage/course/audit. There is nothing to configure. Recording is always on: you cannot choose what the log covers, turn it off for your course, or edit or delete an entry once it exists.
The page shows no rows, even when changes have been recorded. The table renders with all its headers, reports a count of 0 Rows, and shows no error, so nothing on screen tells you the rows are missing.This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.The consequence to carry away is that an empty audit log is not evidence that nothing happened in your course. If you are working through a grade dispute or an academic integrity case, do not treat this page as a clean record.
The Audit Log page rendering an empty table: the six column headers each with a filter box, pagination reading Page 1 of 0, and a count of 0 Rows, with no error shown

​
What gets recorded

Every recorded change produces one row, carrying:
  • When the change happened.
  • Who made it — the account, resolved against your roster for display.
  • What kind of course record changed — an assignment, a rubric check, a gradebook column — shown in the Table column.
  • The change itself — the full record before and after, as JSON.
  • The IP address the change came from.
The log covers changes to:
  • Assignments, assignment due date exceptions, assignment groups, and assignment group membership
  • Rubric parts, rubric criteria, and rubric checks
  • Submissions, submission reviews, and submission comments (both global comments and line annotations)
  • Gradebook columns and gradebook cell values
  • Discussion threads
  • Profiles and student tags
  • Lab sections and lab section meetings

​
What does not get recorded

  • Most deletions. Insert and update are recorded everywhere, but delete is recorded only for rubric parts, criteria and checks, due date exceptions, assignment group membership, lab section meetings, tags, gradebook columns, and gradebook cell values. Deleting an assignment, a submission, a submission comment, a discussion thread, an assignment group, a profile, or a lab section leaves no audit row.
  • Reads. The log records writes. Nobody’s viewing of a submission, a grade, or a student’s profile is recorded.
  • Anything outside those record types. Office hours activity, help requests, polls, surveys, flashcards, enrollment changes, feature flag changes, emails sent from the Emailer, and workflow runs are not in the audit log.

​
Can you see who changed a grade?

For grades, yes — with a caveat about which column tells you who.
  • Gradebook cell edits and overrides are recorded, as inserts, updates, and deletes on the gradebook’s per-student values.
  • Gradebook column changes — adding a column, editing its expression or maximum, releasing it — are recorded.
  • Rubric-based grading is recorded through submission reviews and through submission comments and line annotations, which is where applied rubric checks live.
The column labeled Student Name is not the student the row is about. It is the name of the account that performed the change, looked up in your roster. To find who edited a particular student’s grade, filter on the Table and Resource ID columns and read Student Name as “actor”.This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.When a change comes from a background job rather than a signed-in person — the autograder writing a submission, a gradebook recalculation — there is no account to name, so the column is blank. Expect that for a good share of the rows in a busy course.

​
Reading the table

The table has six columns: Date, Student Name, IP Address, Table, Resource ID, and Change. Rows are sorted newest-first by default; click any header to sort by it. Change shows only the top-level fields whose values differ, as Was: and Now: pairs. A field that gained a value shows just the new value; a field that lost one shows Removed. Hover a field name for the raw JSON of both sides. Fields whose values are themselves objects or arrays are left out of the diff, and if neither side of the change is an object the cell reads Change not displayable as object diff. Resource ID identifies the record after the change, so it is empty for recorded deletions — a Resource ID filter will never match one.

​
Filtering

Every column header has a text box under it. Typing in it filters the rows already loaded, in your browser, on a case-insensitive substring match; it never goes back for rows it does not already have. The Date box matches the date as it is rendered, so you are searching the displayed text rather than a date range; there is no from/to date picker.
The page loads every audit row for your course before filtering or paginating any of them. On a busy course this makes the first load slow. Paging controls at the bottom let you show 25, 50 (the default), 100, 200, or 500 rows at a time, and the row count under them reflects your active filters.

​
There is no export

The audit log has no download or Export to CSV control, unlike most other staff tables. See Exporting Course Data for what can be exported. If you need audit rows in a file, ask a Pawtograder administrator.

​
How far back the log goes

90 days. Entries are discarded a whole day at a time once they pass 90 days old, by a job that runs nightly. Dropped days are gone permanently — there is no archive or cold copy inside the product. The 90-day window is fixed platform-wide. It is not configurable per course or per deployment.
If you need a change history to survive longer than 90 days — for an academic integrity case, a grade appeal, or an institutional records requirement — you have to arrange it before the ninetieth day, and you cannot do it from this page. Ask a Pawtograder administrator: an operator can preserve a specific day’s entries instead of letting them drop.The audit log is the only part of your course’s data that prunes itself. Its 90-day window is much shorter than the retention period covering everything else, so do not treat the audit log as the long-term record of your course.

​
Who can read it

The Audit Log menu entry appears for instructors only; graders do not see it. Staff pages admit both instructors and graders, so a grader who types the URL reaches the page.