Changing exam duration when there are existing reservations with old duration

[ffund]

Currently, when you change the duration of an exam that is associated with a center, any existing reservations for that exam silently keep their existing (old) duration.

This is probably not what a user would want in this situation - usually you'd want all "regular" students to have the same duration for the same exam.

Suggestions:

• when changing exam duration, offer to automatically update existing reservations to the extent possible
• and note/have a prominent visual indicator in "Reservations" list for the ones that are not possible to update automatically (e.g. new duration doesn't fit in session)

or

• when changing exam duration, warn user if there are existing reservations (which probably should be updated)
• and in "Reservations" list for an exam, have some visual indication of reservations where duration (or duration plus extended time, if relevant) does not match current exam duration

[nwalters512]

Can you say more about why you're changing durations for exams for which students have already started making reservations? Is this a common part of your workflow, or an "oops, I entered the wrong duration" situation?

Your second suggestion (warn and allow manual fixing) is definitely the easier of the two to reimplement, as we don't have to try updating reservations on the fly (they're generally considered immutable) or track state like "tried to update, but could not". With time extensions and bridging in play, it's highly likely that one would frequently run into scenarios where a reservation could not be automatically updated.

[ffund]

This comes up in small-scale/pilot CBTF setting where there is less standardization around exams, instructors have more direct permissions, and instructors don't have much experience with CBTF setting.

Example: An instructor initially sets up a 90 minute exam. A few days before the first session, they finish writing the actual exam and decide that actually, it should be only a 75 minute exam. They change the exam duration in PT, without realizing that students who already made reservations will still get 90 minutes.

(This actually happened and nobody noticed until the end of the 75 minutes, it was a mess 😭 )