Active high, rising edge circuits update state when, exactly?
"The circuit is beside the point, however."

Nope. In general, "flip-flop" means an edge-triggered device. If the circuit responds when the clock is at a particular level, it's called a latch.

So a flip-flop (active high) would respond only on the transition from low to high, and will ignore the inputs  at any other time.

A latch (active high) will respond to the inputs as long as the clock is high.

To make things worse, given the apparently basic nature of your course, there is the possibility that the two flip-flops form a master-slave flip-flop. This allows you to create an edge-triggered flip-flop from two latches.

So, without actually seeing the circuit, there is no way to answer your question.