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[Clock] Review Test Cases and Discuss Structure and Objectives of Exercise #3012
Description
Filing this as a tracking issue and invitation to a discussion on revisions to this exercise.
The intent of Clock was to practice class customization and operator overloading via dunder methods in Python.
We've recently had quite a few changes, adding __repr__ to the mix, as well as additional instructions and tests in support of that change. A few issues have now come up around it:
- Issue [Clock] Proposal for additional tests #2926
- Issue [Clock] Improved/additional tests for __add__ and __sub__ #3008
It feels like this exercise is overloaded. It especially has too many tests, and is perhaps not clear enough in its directions and hints as to what the student does or does not need to think about for their implementations.
Thoughts on rework/adjustment clarification strategies welcome here.
Activity
github-actions commentedon Apr 17, 2022
deekshahavaragi commentedon Dec 13, 2025
Hi
While reviewing the current test cases for the Clock exercise, I noticed that
there isn’t a very explicit example highlighting wraparound behavior across
midnight (for example, 23:59 + 2 minutes → 00:01).
Do you think adding a small, focused test case like this would help clarify
the intended behavior for learners without increasing overall complexity?
Happy to open a PR if this sounds reasonable.
Thanks!
BethanyG commentedon Dec 14, 2025
Hi @deekshahavaragi 👋🏽
Thanks for the comment and the offer of help! 🙂
This is an exercises that pulls test data from a common repo that serves most language tracks on Exercism - not just the Python track. The tests you see here are auto-generated from that problem specification data via a script and a JinJa2 template.
To add test cases for these types of exercises, we generally discuss them first on the forum and get buy in from at least three track maintainers. The PR then is made to the canonical data in the
problem-specsrepo, and not this Python content repo.So I would recommend opening an issue under the
Exercism - Building Exercismcategory in the forum, similar to this thread, to discuss adding a test case 😄 . Many thanks!PS: That being said, the original problem as stated above is that this exercise already has too many test cases, and might need a rework in implementation, due to the amount of class-based customizations expected from students.