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 deadline 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 repo — 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 repo.

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

TA — Read-only access to the config repo.

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.

Deadline (due date) — An optional date and time for an assignment. Submissions after it are marked late; nothing is blocked.

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 — Collected results. The gradebook (scores.json) is built by the score-collection workflow; teachers can download it as CSV.

Access and setup

Service token — A fine-grained personal access token (PAT) stored as a secret in the config repo. 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.