Glossary

Glossary

Terms used throughout Classroom 50, in the web app, the CLI, and this wiki.

Core concepts

Classroom — The basic unit of Classroom 50: one course's students, assignments, roster, and scores. A classroom belongs to a GitHub organization, and an organization can hold several classrooms (for example, one per term or section).

Assignment — A piece of coursework in a classroom. May be individual or group, may include starter code, and may have a due date and autograding.

Individual assignment — Each student gets their own repository.

Group assignment — Teammates share one repository. The first student to accept creates it and invites the others.

Roster — The list of students in a classroom. Backed by a roster.csv file, but the classroom's GitHub team is the source of truth for who is enrolled.

Organization (org) — The GitHub organization that hosts a Classroom 50 setup. Requires the Team or Enterprise plan.

Config repository — The private classroom50 repository in your organization. It holds every classroom's settings, roster, assignments, autograders, and scores. Classroom 50 has no other backend.

Roles

Teacher — Full control of a classroom. Granted organization owner and write access to the config repository.

Head TA — Write access to the config repository, but not organization owner.

TA — Read-only access to the config repository.

Student — A member of the classroom who accepts and submits assignments.

Founder — For a group assignment, the student who accepts first: they create the shared repository and invite the other teammates as collaborators.

Assignments and grading

Template repository — A GitHub repository, flagged as a template, that supplies an assignment's starter code. Each student who accepts gets a copy. Assignments can also be template-less, in which case a student's repository contains only the autograder setup.

Due date — An optional date and time for an assignment. Submissions after it are marked late; nothing is blocked. To actually stop submissions, use Close submission on the submissions page.

Autograder — The grading logic that runs on each submission. Can be declarative tests (defined in the assignment) or a Python script you write.

Declarative tests — Input/output, run-command, and pytest checks defined directly on an assignment, graded with no code to write.

Runner — The shared grading engine that runs in GitHub Actions on every submission.

Submission — A push to a student's assignment repository. Each submission is tagged, graded, and published as a GitHub Release.

Feedback pull request — An optional, long-lived pull request per student repository for inline review of a student's work.

Score / gradebook — A score is the number a submission earned (score out of max-score); the gradebook (scores.json) is the collected record of every submission, built by the score-collection workflow. Teachers can download it as CSV. See Reading results in Autograders.

Score override — A teacher-set score entered on the submissions page, stored in the gradebook and left untouched by autograding until cleared. Used for manual grading and for overriding an autograded result (which is preserved and restored when the override is cleared).

Access and setup

Service token — A fine-grained personal access token (PAT) stored as a secret in the config repository. The score-collection and regrade workflows use it to read and update student repositories.

Accept — The student action that creates their assignment repository from the template.

Submit — The student action that pushes work for grading.

Unlisted classroom — A classroom whose published files live at an unguessable URL instead of a predictable one. This is obscurity, not access control: anyone with the link can read the files.

Repository naming

Assignment repositories are named:

<classroom>-<assignment>-<username>

For a group assignment, <username> is the founder who created the shared repository.

Coming from GitHub Classroom?

Most vocabulary carries over unchanged: classroom, roster, assignment, individual and group assignments, template repository, starter code, accept. Where the words — or the behavior behind them — differ:

GitHub Classroom	Classroom 50
Deadline / cutoff date	Due date. It only marks later submissions late — nothing is blocked. The enforcement tools are Close submission (block new accepts, set repositories read-only) and Lock assignment.
Download grades (CSV)	Download scores (CSV) on an assignment's submissions page. The underlying gradebook is scores.json in your config repository. See Reading results in Autograders.
Roster identifier and student self-linking	Doesn't exist — there's nothing to link. The roster is keyed by GitHub username (the numeric github_id is resolved automatically); you invite students, and accept links work once they've joined the organization.
Teams (group assignments)	Groups. The first student to accept (the founder) creates the shared repository and invites teammates as collaborators — there is no separate team-creation step.
Autograding presets (.github/classroom/autograding.json)	Declarative tests, stored on the assignment itself (Input/Output, Run command, Python/pytest). An existing autograding.json workflow can be kept with a custom runner workflow.
Hosted service stores your data	Everything lives in your GitHub organization (config repository, student repositories, Actions).

To bring an existing classroom over, see gh teacher classroom migrate and the migration FAQ.