13. Event definitions for special exam post-submission and review#

Status#

Draft 2023-10-02

Context#

About Special Exams:#

  • Course subsections that have an exam_type have additional logic that governs completion, grading, credit requirements, and more based on the exam_type value (e.g. timed, proctored, etc).

  • These subsections are also known as Special Exams.

    • NOTE: The events described in this document will only be produced/consumed in the context of Special Exams.

  • Course subsections that do not have an exam_type configured may still have a grading policy named ‘Exam’. This type of content does not have the exam user experience and is not governed by any exam specific logic.

The New Exams IDA:#

  • A new backend for exams called edx-exams is being developed (See the exams IDA ADR for more info).

  • We are currently working to use the event bus to trigger the downstream effects whenever an exam attempt is submitted or reviewed.

    • For example, when an exam attempt is submitted, we will want to make sure edx-platform knows to mark the exam subsection as completed.

Decision#

Where these events will be produced/consumed:#

  • edx-exams will produce these events.

    • NOTE: There is no plan to have the legacy exams backend, edx-proctoring, produce these events.

  • edx-platform will consume these events in order to handle all behavior as it pertains to the state of an exam subsection.

Event Definitions:#

Note on the Event Data/Signal Names:#

We are using the prefix “Exam” as opposed to the prefix “Special_Exam” for these events because Special Exams will likely be the only type of exam that will be of concern to developers in the context of events for the forseeable future.

Consequences#

  • edx-exams will emit events via the event bus to send information without needing a response.

  • Since, edx-exams already recieves and responds to REST requests, we will avoid creating circular dependencies because edx-exams will not need to send REST requests itself.

  • These events are dynamic, in that they can also be consumed by other services/applications as needed in the future.