If an Essay question is submitted with no text in its body, but with one or more attachments, it is currently considered an incomplete response, which has two adverse effects:

• The response does not show up as needing grading in the "manual grading" report-- or in any other report that relies on the "needs grading" question state.
• The response passed as "incomplete" to the behavior; in most behaviors, this results in the response being graded with a "0".

In many cases, the instructor may wish to grant partial or full credit based on the attached file; in which case this will very likely lead to student confusion (as the student sees a zero grade instead of "not yet marked")-- and potentially to a misgrading, if the instructor is not careful to investigate all zeroes or review all automatically graded submissions.