Assignments starting in (almost) real-time

[oliviercailloux]

Feature request ✨

I would like to have a guarantee that when my students accept an assignment, they can start to work on it in the next two minutes

Use case
Graded individual exercise. The specifics of the exercise must not be known by students in advance. I prepare the assignment ahead of time, but publish the link only at the start of the session. Students have to accept the assignment individually, work on it, and commit their work. The exercise is timed: students have, say 20 minutes to finish the exercise (usually a few simple programming questions).
Therefore, it is important that I can count on students not having to wait long for their repository to be set-up correctly. First, for problem of wasting time during teaching session; second, for fairness reasons: it shouldn’t be that some students get to start their exercise immediately while others have to wait for long.

Current solution is unsatisfactory
As this comment explains, the current functionality of creating a new repository on the basis of an existing one depends on the source import API, which “is not guaranteed to be instantaneous”.

Let me make it clear that I do not talk about the problem of sporadically slow downs of source imports. I refer to the architectural problem that there is no guarantee that the repository gets created in a timely fashion.

As I understand it, even when the problems of frequent slow downs will have been solved (to phrase it optimistically), a teacher will still not be in a position where it is reasonable to count on the fact that students can all start their assignments at the same time (say, within an acceptable delay of one minute, max. two). Therefore, impossible to seriously use this service to plan exercises meant for grading students.

Possible solution
GitHub could, for example, provide a way for a teacher to pre-specify the number of students in the class. GitHub would create in advance that number of repositories in the corresponding organization. It would be requested that the teacher does it, say, two days in advance (or some time depending on the number of students), in order to guarantee that the repositories be ready when starting the session. When students accept the assignment, the repository no more has to be created on the fly, but GitHub only has to transfer ownership and rename the repository.