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.

Slug

The short lowercase identifier of a classroom or an assignment, used in URLs and repository names. The web app derives it from the name (letters with diacritics transliterate to their base letters); the CLI calls a classroom's slug its short-name.

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. A row identifies a student by github_id or GitHub username; a student invited by email has a pending row, identified by their address, until they accept. There is no equivalent of GitHub Classroom's roster identifier or student self-linking.

Pending row

A roster.csv row for someone invited by email who hasn't accepted yet. It holds the invited address and role, with no username or github_id, because GitHub offers no way to look up an account from an email address. A sync fills in the account once they accept; cancelling the invitation removes the row immediately, and an expired one is cleared by the next sync, from either tool.

Invite team

A secret GitHub team, named invite-<hash>, that holds one invited address until that person joins. It is how an email invitation is matched to the GitHub account that accepts it. Classroom 50 creates one per email invitation and removes it once the invitation has been accepted, cancelled, or expired. Both the web app and the teacher CLI create and read them, so an invitation sent from one can be completed or revoked from the other. For more information, see Invitations by email.

Sync

A pass that catches roster.csv up with the classroom's GitHub state: it records the students who accepted an email invitation, fills in a missing github_id, drops the pending rows nothing backs, and retires the invite teams that are done. Nothing runs on its own: the web app runs a sync when a teacher opens a classroom or its roster, and gh teacher roster sync runs one on demand. This is not Collect now, which collects scores. See What triggers a sync.

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 starts with a README and the autograding setup instead of starter code (see Repository shapes for variations).

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 triggers one graded run, which tags and publishes a GitHub Release — so grading is per push. The submissions page, however, counts per commit: each student commit past the starter commit on the default branch (excluding the tool's own bookkeeping commits), so a push of several commits is graded once but counted several times.

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, regrade, and token-probe 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.

GitHub caps a repository name at 100 characters, so the classroom and assignment slugs share a budget that leaves room for any username. An assignment slug that predates the budget can be renamed once to fit; the old slug is recorded as renamed_from and stays permanently reserved, so GitHub's redirects from the old repository names keep working. See assignment rename.

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.