cocalc
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sagemathinc
courses: do something sensible when a student deletes their account
Deleting an account is not something a student could accidentally do - there's a huge warning, etc. However, students sometimes do it in a panic. In fact, in just one single recent class 17 students deleted their accounts and over 60 accounts were deleted in the last week. So it happens.
In our course code, I think we assumed that people don't delete their accounts on whim; in fact, much of the course code was written before there was account deletion functionality. If they do delete their account, it's going to take some manual work to fix things. Once they make their first account, that is the one associated to the course. If they then delete their account and make a new one with the same email address, they are going to be in big trouble and probably the only possible fix right now is for them to get added as a new student with a different email address.
Honestly, I'm not even sure what the semantics for this should be.
I ran into this warning today when I tried to delete a test account I made for myself to see what students see. As far as semantics go, my expectation would be that if a student deletes their account, then they would be "de-registered" from the course, removed from the shared project, and have their student project deleted so that everything is returned to the prior state.
Probably not the best sementics though for students who accidentally delete their account and don't want all their work lost etc. though.
It does not seem that we have to deal with 60 accidentally deleted projects per week anymore, so the current behaviour is reasonably sensible.
We also have a big message right in the delete box about this which points to this issue:
Evidently, people do read it.
Crazy -- just a few minutes after I posted my comment a student opened a support request in which they deleted their account to "To try to fix it", and now they are locked out from their course, etc. We haven't had this happen in months (or years), and it happens moments after discussing it.
The feedback from the student was basically: "I saw and read the above message, but the TA told me to delete my account anyways."
Obviously this issue needs to stay open.