Is there something special about Rspec handling for date fields?
I set a required date field (validates_presence_of) to nil, say "a.should_not be_valid’ and yet the spec passes. When I display the record, that date field clearly has nil.
That’s odd. I would definitely expect a validation error in that instance.
Can you post a link to a gist of your code and the console output that shows it failing?
Thanks!
I’ll see if I can recreate, but I’ve changed a bunch of stuff and things all seem to be working now.
Ah, the ol’ “change lots of stuff until it’s fixed” debugging method 
Glad to hear it’s working.