Can't access course as staff when entrance exam is enabled AND haven't passed entrance exam

[sarina]

Expected Behavior

Given that I am Staff on a course
When an Entrance Exam is enabled for my course AND I have not passed the entrance exam
And I am viewing my course in the Learning MFE as a Staff user
I can still view, and interact with, my course subsections, units, and left sidebar nav

Actual Behavior

I cannot view or interact with course subsections, units, or left sidebar nav (which is hidden entirely)

Reproduction Steps

1. On an Open edX instance, enable the Entrance Exam feature (https://docs.openedx.org/en/latest/educators/how-tos/set_up_course/require_entrance_exam.html)
2. Create a new course, and add a new subsection with at least 2 distinct units. Publish the units.
3. Enable the Entrance Exam. (Note: Bug is reproducible whether or not the Entrance Exam has content)
4. As Staff click "View Live Course"
5. Note that the subsection (after the entrance exam) - you can see the first unit but cannot see or navigate to the second or subsequent units.

[magajh]

@ayub02, @openedx/wg-product, could you please help us prioritize this issue on the board?

[mariajgrimaldi]

Thanks for the report, @sarina!

@ahmed-arb: could you help us turn on entrance exams in the sandbox so we can properly triage this? Thank you!

[ayub02]

@mariajgrimaldi Ahmed is out of office until Dec 13th. I'm tagging @regisb here instead.

I'm assuming we need Edly's help to execute the process outlined here.

[regisb]

Do we want to enable entrance exams...

1. ... just in the sandbox? If yes...
   a. ... can you create a tutor plugin or give us a command to run on the sandbox to enable the feature?
   b. ... how do we handle users (like @sarina above) who did not enable the feature but do see the feature in the UI anyway, and don't know why it's not working?
2. ... or for all users?
   • if yes, can I suggest we make a change to edx-platform to toggle the feature by default for everyone? (ENTRANCE_EXAMS = True in lms/envs/common.py and cms/envs/common.py)

Honestly I'm asking the question but I'm kinda guessing the answer: we want 1a) because we want to avoid making changes in Open edX upstream and making changes in Tutor is easier. But there is no easy way to toggle the feature other than by creating a Tutor plugin. Which is a bit of a waste! This is effectively a feature that no one is ever going to use because the feature is not advertised. Also, we have no idea how to solve 1b).

My suggestion would be to go with option 2: toggle the feature for everyone upstream.

[sarina]

I agree with toggling the feature on for everyone, but I think it's possibly a bit late in the release cycle to make that type of change. I'll check with @jmakowski1123

how do we handle users (like @sarina above) who did not enable the feature but do see the feature in the UI anyway, and don't know why it's not working?

I didn't see this in the Ulmo sandbox. I reported this as a bug testing on an Axim sandbox.

[sarina]

Spoke with Jenna - Agreed that we shouldn't have a default change a week before the release, but we'll be doing some work in the Product WG to figure out our default changes for Verawood.

[ahmed-arb]

Hi everyone, I’m back from vacation. Thanks for the discussion so far! 👋

Following up on Regis’s comment, could you share the specific commands you want me to run on the sandbox server to enable this?

[sarina]

I think we should skip this failure for Ulmo, since it's not on by default. The Product WG will be discussing making this option on-by-default for Verawood, so this should be fixed in the Verawood release cycle.