Disabling entrance exams causes an error when updating course settings

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1

Hi all,
We’ve identified a bug. After enabling and disabling entrance exams in a course in the Schedule & Details page, then all updates in course settings are ignored. This cannot be fixed from Studio, except by re enabling entrance exams. It can also happen when importing a course from an older Open edX version.

Instructions to reproduce:

  • Setup a platform with FEATURES.ENTRANCE_EXAMS set to True.
  • Enable Entrance Exams in the Schedule & Settings page of a course
  • Disable Entrance Exams
  • Make any change in the course setting (e.g. change the display name)
  • The change will not be reflected
  • In the cms logs, a line like this will be shown:
2022-07-27 14:15:46,424 INFO 13 [openedx.core.djangoapps.content.course_overviews.models] [user 7] [ip 10.0.4.229] models.py:329 - Multiple CourseOverviews for course course-v1:ORG+COURSE+EDITION requested simultaneously; will only save one.

The problem is caused when trying to update the course_overview object with an empty entrance_exam_minimum_score_pct.

This variable is set to None and stored in the modulestore by the Settings & Details page view, when the user unticks the entrance exam option.

Then, a None value is allowed in the course_overview model which triggers an IntegrityError when trying to update the record.

I believe this problem was introduced when adding Entrance Exam capability to the learning MFE.
How to fix this?

  • Checking for an empty value of course.entrance_exam_minimum_score_pct in the course_overview model and setting course_overview.entrance_exam_minimum_score_pct to a default (maybe using float(settings.ENTRANCE_EXAM_MIN_SCORE_PCT), which has a default value of 50 in the cms settings). This will fix this particular case, but I’m not sure if this may appear somewhere else.
  • I’m not sure why disabling entrance exam sets entrance_exam_minimum_score_pct to None in the modulestore. Maybe leaving this value as it is by removing this line will be enough. Anyway this will not fix the problem when importing a course with that value empty in the settings.
2

To workaround this problem, run the following script in the CMS python shell (./manage.py cms shell):

course_id='course-v1:ORG+COURSE+EDITION'
user_id=#<your numeric user id>

from opaque_keys.edx.keys import CourseKey
from openedx.core.lib.courses import get_course_by_id
from xmodule.modulestore.django import modulestore

course_key = CourseKey.from_string(course_id)
course = get_course_by_id(course_key)
setattr(course, 'entrance_exam_minimum_score_pct', 50)
modulestore().update_item(course, user_id)
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