0082. Quiz attempt deadline holds on every queue driver

• Status: Proposed
• Date: 2026-10-09

Context and problem statement

Starting a GIFT quiz attempt dispatched MarkAttemptAsEnded with ->delay($attempt->end_at). The sync queue driver ignores the delay and runs the job at once, so the job set end_at to now and the attempt ended the moment it was created (found in the Phase 3 e2e runs with QUEUE_CONNECTION=sync).

Decision

• The deadline is the attempt’s end_at, checked server-side on read and submit (QuizAttempt::isEnded(), the attempt policy). That does not depend on any queue.
• The delayed job is dispatched only when the default connection can delay (MarkAttemptAsEnded::queueCanDelay(): not sync, not null).
• The deadline job carries atDeadline = true and never ends an attempt whose end_at is still in the future, so a misconfigured driver cannot end it early. Submitting and the explicit “end attempt” endpoint still end it immediately.
• No scheduled sweep: there is no “finalised” marker column, and adding one is a data-model change that this fix does not need.

Consequences

• With sync (or null) no event is fired when a deadline passes without a submit; scoring, status and access are still correct because they derive from end_at.
• Tests cover sync, null, database and redis.