Glossary

Glossary

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

One concept, one term: when writing about Classroom 50, use the terms defined here and avoid mixing in synonyms, so readers never have to wonder whether two words mean two different things. Occasional slips are understandable, but this page is the reference. If you find copy that disagrees with it, file an issue.

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. Groups replace GitHub Classroom's teams: there is no separate team-creation step and no group names.

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. The roster is keyed by GitHub username; there is no equivalent of GitHub Classroom's roster identifier or student self-linking.

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

The classroom50 repository — The private repository named classroom50 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 classroom50 repository.

Head TA — Write access to the classroom50 repository, but not organization owner.

TA — Read-only access to the classroom50 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, unlike GitHub Classroom's cutoff date. 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. They fill the role of GitHub Classroom's autograding.json presets; an existing autograding.json workflow can be kept with a custom runner workflow.

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 / collected scores — A score is the number a submission earned (score out of max-score). The collected scores (scores.json in the classroom50 repository) are the record of every submission, built by the score-collection workflow. Teachers can download them as CSV. See Reading results in Autograding Basics.

Score override — A teacher-set score entered on the submissions page, stored with the collected scores 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 classroom50 repository. The score-collection and regrade workflows use it to read and update student repositories.

Workflow files — The GitHub Actions files Classroom 50 places in the classroom50 repository and in each assignment repository (such as autograde.yaml) to run grading, collection, and publishing.

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 behavior behind a term differs, the entry above says so. To bring an existing classroom over, see gh teacher classroom migrate and the migration FAQ.