Common questions about Classroom 50, grouped by topic. For error messages and fixes, see Troubleshooting; for terms, see the Glossary.

You need a GitHub organization on the Team or Enterprise plan. Verified educators get GitHub Team free through GitHub Education, which unlocks everything Classroom 50 relies on (notably GitHub Pages from a private repo). Free/personal organizations can't host a classroom.

The teaching model is familiar — you create assignments (optionally with starter code), students accept to get their own repository, and submissions are auto-graded — but Classroom 50 has no server or database of its own. Your classroom settings, roster, assignments, and scores are stored in a private classroom50 config repo in your organization, and grading runs in GitHub Actions. See How Classroom 50 Works for the full model, or the Glossary for the core concepts.

Both, and they're alternatives, not supplements. Teachers can do everything from classroom50.org or from the gh teacher CLI; students can accept and submit from either. Use whichever you prefer. See the Web Teacher Guide or CLI Teacher Guide.

There's no server to host. Classroom 50 runs entirely on GitHub's infrastructure and public APIs. The web app is a static, open-source site, so you're welcome to host your own copy. It only integrates with GitHub, not with self-hosted Git platforms.

Yes. A classroom is a directory in your organization's classroom50 config repo, and an organization can hold as many as you like, for example one per course, section, or term. Add each with Create classroom in the web app or gh teacher classroom add.

You don't have to. Because one organization holds many classrooms, most teachers use a single organization and add a classroom per course or term. You can still use separate organizations if you prefer — each just needs its own one-time setup.

Yes. Classroom 50 has four roles: teacher (organization owner, full control), head TA (config-repo write, not an owner), TA (config-repo read-only), and student. Manage staff in the web app under a classroom's Settings → Staff and roles, or with gh teacher staff add. See the Glossary for what each role can do.

Not on their own — GitHub requires an organization owner to invite members. Add students to the roster (by username, by email, or by bulk CSV upload), which sends the organization invitation. Once they've joined the organization, the assignment accept links work without any further action from you.

Yes. Upload a CSV or a text file of GitHub usernames (web app: Upload; CLI: gh teacher roster import). You can also invite students by email address when you don't know their GitHub username — they complete a short onboarding step to link their account.

Yes. The submissions view lists every rostered student, not just those who accepted, with their status — so you can see at a glance who hasn't started.

They're separate actions, on purpose:

• Unenroll removes the student from the classroom roster and team. It does not remove them from the organization and does not delete their assignment repositories.
• Remove from the organization revokes their access to every repo (including their assignment repos) but still doesn't delete anything.
• Deleting a repository is always a separate, manual step.

See How Classroom 50 Works.

Yes, if the template lives inside your organization. When you register the assignment, Classroom 50 automatically grants the classroom's team read access so students can copy it. A public template works from anywhere. A private template outside your organization can't be shared with students — copy it into your organization or make it public. See Assignment Templates.

Yes. Deadlines support a date and time (down to the second, in your timezone). Submissions after the deadline are marked late; nothing is blocked automatically.

• Template-less (no template chosen): students get a repo containing only the autograder setup — good for write-from-scratch or short-answer work.
• Empty repository: a completely bare repo — no starter files and no autograding or feedback pull request. Use it when students build everything themselves, including their own GitHub Actions.

Empty repository is permanent for an assignment — you can't switch it on or off after creating the assignment.

Choose Group when creating the assignment and set a maximum group size. The first teammate to accept creates the shared repository and becomes its owner (the "founder"); they then invite the other teammates as collaborators. Everyone on the roster who is a collaborator gets the same score. Group repositories are named after the founder's username; custom group names aren't supported, and renaming a group repository isn't recommended.

The description is stored with the assignment, but student-facing instructions are best placed in the template's README.md — that's what students see when they open their repository. See Assignment Templates.

Yes. Use declarative tests (input/output, run-command, or pytest checks) defined right on the assignment. No grading script needed. For more control, write an autograder.py. See Autograders.

Yes. Create an assignment with no autograding tests, and no grading runs (Classroom 50 still uses a lightweight workflow to tag submissions and support written feedback, which uses far fewer Actions minutes). You can also pause autograding org-wide from the organization's Actions settings in the web app, and setup applies a $0 Actions spending cap by default so a runaway workflow can't run up a bill.

Yes. Set runs-on in the assignment's runtime to your self-hosted labels (for example ["self-hosted", "gpu"]). Self-hosted runners keep their own toolchains, so Classroom 50 skips managed toolchain setup on them — provision what your assignments need in the runner image. See Autograders.

Yes. Each submission's Release and the Actions run summary include a per-test breakdown (expected vs. actual output for I/O tests, captured stderr). A custom autograder.py can add its own diagnostic messages to result.json.

If Codespaces is enabled for your organization, students can open their assignment repository in Codespaces like any other repo. Classroom 50 doesn't manage Codespaces itself — any education Codespaces benefit is handled on GitHub's side.

A few common reasons:

• Scores haven't been collected yet. Collection runs nightly; click Collect now on the submissions page to pull the latest immediately.
• GitHub Pages is still deploying. Right after a config change, published files can take a few minutes to go live.
• The student's repo predates a workflow update. If you updated Classroom 50 after they accepted, have them re-accept (or re-create the repo) to pick up the current setup.

See Troubleshooting for specific error messages.

Yes. Edit the classroom's scores.json in the config repo: change the submission's score and add "override": true to that entry, then commit. Collection leaves overridden entries untouched on future runs. See Collect scores.

Download scores as a CSV from the submissions page (Download scores (CSV)). The gh teacher download command clones every submission repo and also writes a scores.csv summary at the destination root. The raw score data also lives in scores.json in your config repo, so you can build your own automations against it.

You can accept your own assignment, but as an organization owner you'll keep admin on the repository (GitHub won't let an owner reduce their own access to write), so it won't match a real student's setup. To test the exact student experience, use a separate GitHub account that you add to the classroom as a student.

Yes. gh teacher classroom migrate imports a GitHub Classroom into your classroom50 config repo — it copies each starter repo into your organization as a fresh template and recreates the assignments. Rosters, scores, and past student repositories are not migrated; you re-onboard students for the new term. See gh teacher classroom migrate.

Likely yes. As with GitHub Classroom, each student gets a normal GitHub repository named <classroom>-<assignment>-<username>, so scripts that automate git operations against those repos generally carry over.

Classroom 50 authenticates the same way the GitHub CLI does, using GitHub's repo scope. That scope is all-or-nothing — GitHub provides no way to limit it to a single organization's repositories — so the grant covers your repos even though Classroom 50 only acts on classroom ones. This matches the CLI's behavior.

The service token is a fine-grained personal access token stored as a secret in your config repo; the score-collection and regrade workflows use it. It's the same token whether you set it up through the web app or the CLI — you only need one per organization. See the service-token setup.

Some capabilities from GitHub Classroom aren't available today, including LTI / LMS grade passback and a built-in manual-grading UI. Classroom 50 is open source and actively developed — share ideas or track direction in Discussions.