ORA Rubric Point Field Accepts Only Integers — Why Not Decimals?

Educators Authoring
1

Hi everyone,

I’m working with the Open Response Assessment (ORA) feature in our instance of edx‑ora2, and I’ve encountered a limitation in the rubric configuration that I hope someone can explain (or point to a plan/issue).

What I see:

  • In the Studio interface, when editing an assessment’s Rubric tab and using “Option Points”, I can set integer values (for example: 5) and save successfully.

  • When I try to set a decimal value (for example: 4.55) and then click Save, I get the error:

    Save Unsuccessful – Errors detected on the following tabs: Rubric

  • After some investigation, I found that the system appears to accept only integer values and rejects any fractional or decimal points.

  • GitHub - openedx/edx-ora2: Open Response Assessment Suite

My questions:

  • Is there a technical or design reason why ORA/edx-ora2 currently restricts Option Points to integers only?

  • Is there any open issue, pull request, or roadmap item under consideration that would allow decimal (floating) values for rubric points in a future version of edx-ora2?

Thanks in advance for any clarification, pointers to relevant issues, or suggestions. :slight_smile:

2

I don’t have an “official” answer for you but if I were to guess it would be that using integers simplifies the aggregation and avoids floating-point strict validation to prevent malformed XML from causing runtime errors. I suppose in theory it could be modified to support floats instead of integers but there may well have been a good reason it wasn’t designed this way.

If you’d like to dig deeper, I think this is the bit of code specific to the issue you’re having, though there may probably be other areas that consume this value which might be expecting an integer, so I don’t anticipate it’ll be as simple as changing int() to float()