Student role omitted when creating a new assignment

I had a customer today report that the students did not have permission to view an assignment in a course.  I browsed to their site and logged in as administrator and created a new account in their site and enrolled the account in the course in question.  In a second browser, I logged into the new account and browsed to the course and clicked on the assignment in question.

Sure enough, when I tried to view the assignment in my student browser, I was greeted with the message:

Why is moodle omitting the Student role when creating an assignment activity??

In my administration browser, I clicked on the assignment and then on the Permissions link in the Settings block.

Sure enough, the student role was not listed in the Roles with permission column for the assignment.


where is the student role?  why was it omitted?  I added a new assignment in the topic and saw the same behavior.  I actually saw it anywhere in this active course when i tried adding a new assignment.  Some of the other assignments in the same course were fine, the Student role was included. I opened a second course on the site and added a new assignment and the Student role was also included.  Very STRANGE!  Why only new assignments in this course?

Why won't moodle allow me to add the Student role to the context of the assignment in a specific course??

The workaround was to add the Authenticated user role to each of the Capabilities.  Moodle would not allow me to add the Student role to the context of the assignment, I guess that makes sense, since it would not add it when the assignment was created either!.  I shared the workaround with my customer, always building more trust with them, but i am at a lose as to why this was happening in this course.