Action minutes going over

[dianestephens]

I migrated my github classroom assignments with autograded tests to classroom50. I have used the assignments before and never approached the action minute limit for my organization. However, I noticed on Sept. 2 that I was over 700 minutes used of the 3000 min included for the month. My ~150 students had just submitted an assignmend which was autograded on push. I instruct them to run tests locally and push to submit. I downloaded the activity report and noticed the old classroom.yml was running. Also, a few students pushed multiple times. I will delete the classroom.yml from future templates. In the meantime, several assignments are already accepted and I have many more for my students to accept through the end of the month. If I change from autograde on push to on submit tag, is this more efficient? What is the best workflow to minimize the action minutes?

1. First, for the future assignments that have not been released yet.
2. Second, how to minimize the minutes for those already accepted.

I currently have disabled autograding, btw. Thanks in advance for advice!

[ish4ra]

Yes — switching these assignments from “every push” to tagged submissions is probably the biggest Actions-minutes saving you can make.

With Classroom 50’s default every-push mode, every push to the default branch starts a grading run. So if 150 students each push several times while working, the number of Actions jobs grows very quickly. This matters even when the actual tests are short, because GitHub bills Actions jobs in minimum increments.

In tag submission mode, ordinary git push operations do not run the Classroom 50 autograder at all. Students can push as often as they want while working, run tests locally, and then use:

gh student submit

when they actually want the commit graded. That command pushes a submit/* tag, which is what triggers the grading workflow.

For your two cases:

1. Future assignments that have not been accepted yet

I would:

• Remove the old .github/workflows/classroom.yml from the assignment template.
• Set the Classroom 50 assignment’s Submission type to “A tagged commit” before students accept it.
• Keep the built-in autograder only on assignments that actually need it.
• If an assignment does not need Classroom 50 autograding at all, use “Do not use the built-in autograder” rather than simply having an autograder with no tests.

That gives students a workflow like:

edit → test locally → git push as often as needed → gh student submit when ready

Only that final explicit submission consumes an autograding run.

2. Assignments students have already accepted

This is important: changing submission_mode in the assignment is not enough by itself, because the trigger is stored in .github/workflows/autograde.yaml inside each already-created student repository.

Classroom 50 has a retrofit specifically for this.

From the CLI:

gh teacher assignment submission-mode ORG CLASSROOM ASSIGNMENT --tag

That changes the assignment to tag mode and rewrites the autograding trigger in the existing student repositories.

From the web interface, change the assignment’s Submission type, then go to the submissions page and use:

Actions → Update autograding triggers

After the retrofit, students with existing clones should git pull, since the workflow file in their repository has changed.

There is a separate issue with the old GitHub Classroom workflow you found.

.github/workflows/classroom.yml is an independent GitHub Actions workflow. Changing Classroom 50 to tag mode only changes Classroom 50’s autograde.yaml; it does not disable or remove the old GitHub Classroom workflow.

So for repositories that were already created with classroom.yml, I would remove or disable that workflow as well. Otherwise it can continue running on every push and consume minutes even though Classroom 50 itself has been switched to submit-only mode.

Also, if by “disabled autograding” you mean Classroom 50’s Pause autograding feature, that disables the Classroom 50 autograde.yaml workflows, but it does not automatically disable unrelated workflows such as the old classroom.yml.

My practical setup for ~150 students would therefore be:

• tagged-commit submission mode
• students run tests locally while developing
• ordinary pushes do not grade
• gh student submit only when they want a recorded submission
• remove the legacy classroom.yml
• use Classroom 50’s per-assignment “Collect now” rather than repeatedly collecting everything
• completely disable the built-in autograder on assignments where grading is handled another way

That should reduce the number of Actions runs very substantially compared with grading every push.