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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.
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).
A piece of coursework in a classroom. May be individual or group, may include starter code, and may have a due date and autograding.
Each student gets their own repository.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Sync now, which collects scores. See
What triggers a sync.
The GitHub organization that hosts a Classroom 50 setup. Requires the Team or Enterprise plan.
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.
Full control of a classroom. Granted organization owner and write
access to the classroom50 repository.
Write access to the classroom50 repository, but not
organization owner.
Read-only access to the classroom50 repository.
A member of the classroom who accepts and submits assignments.
For a group assignment, the student who accepts first: they create the shared repository and invite the other teammates as collaborators.
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).
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.
The grading logic that runs on each submission. Can be declarative tests (defined in the assignment) or a Python script you write.
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.
The shared grading engine that runs in GitHub Actions on every submission.
A push to a student's assignment repository. Each submission is tagged, graded, and published as a GitHub Release.
An optional, long-lived pull request per student repository for inline review of a student's work.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The student action that creates their assignment repository from the template.
The student action that pushes work for grading.
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.
Assignment repositories are named:
<classroom>-<assignment>-<username>
For a group assignment, <username> is the founder who created the shared
repository.
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.
- Start here
- Teacher guides
- Autograding
- Students
- Reference