select statements

Any ideas on this would be great, I'm trying to edit some drop down lists, the collection _select below does everthing I want it to do and updates the database successfully but doesn't show the default value of the drop down when it appears

<%=collection_select('assigned'+assigned.id.to_s, :qual_id, @quals,:id, :screen_qual)%>

Because of this i started to play with the select statement below instead, this causes the drop downs to display properly with the correct stored values

<%=select_tag('assigned'+assigned.id.to_s, options_from_collection_for_select(@quals, :id, :screen_qual, assigned.qual_id))%>

but when i try to submit causes an error

'We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.'

Am i doing somehtinf obviously wrong? Assigned is a join table between Degree and Qual, the edit function is on a single degree page.

Cheers

Matt