Group Assignments with Group Names (not accepting user)

[srodriguez]

Hi All,

Right now, when a student creates/accepts a group assignment, the generated repo is named classname-assignment-username (e.g. sept-groupproject-srodriguez) — using the creating student's username rather than the group's. Is there a way to have Classroom50 name it classname-assignment-groupname instead (e.g. sept-groupproject-group01)?

I also tried renaming the repo manually after creation (sept-groupproject-srodriguez → sept-groupproject-group01), and everything downstream seems to work fine. The one odd thing I noticed: the assignment's "owner" inside Classroom50 now shows as the new name (@group01) rather than the student who originally created it.

Two questions:

1. Is there a supported/intended way to set the group-name-based naming at creation time, rather than renaming after the fact?
2. If not, is manually renaming the repo actually safe long-term, or does the mismatch between the rename and Classroom50's internal ownership record risk breaking something later — e.g. roster sync, re-generation, permission reconciliation, or anything else tied to that original owner field?

[rongxin-liu]

As of today, group assignments are designed around the assumption that students form their own groups rather than having the instructor create the groups in advance.

Under this model, the student who accepts the assignment first is considered the group "leader." They can then form the group by inviting other organization members to the assignment repository. For group assignments, the student who owns the repository is granted admin access, whereas students in individual assignments receive write access only.

At the moment, we do not provide a way to set a custom group name. For that reason, I do not recommend changing the group assignment repository name, since some of our application logic depends on the current naming convention.

That said, we are open to exploring ways to improve the group assignment experience.

[srodriguez]

Thank you!

[ssardina]

While I was expecting similar to the old GH Classroom approach of creating GH teams for groups, maybe what you say is better and sufficient, among other things we would otherwise be inundated with teams from different classes.

What alarmed me was that the lead user was granted admin right. But as I expected, even that user has limited rights.

For example cannot merge the PR:

Also, they cannot also delete or transfer the repo:

What about disabling rules? I guess only the rules that the user setup but not the org-level one right?

Finally, when they create projects, they are automatically private and cannot be made public by the admin person (this is good, we do not want students seeing other students' projects):

I am just documenting this here as it is not that obvious... I hope there is no other undesirable right for that admin person 🙏🏽

[TeslaSTEMCSTeacher]

Something concerning to me in your answer is that the owner can invite anyone in the organization to be a group member. That makes it sound like it is not restricted to students just in their class if you use the same organization for multiple classes/years which I do. I always assign groups in my class and I never give students admin access to their repositories. I would very much appreciate an option to create my groups from my roster rather or at least the level of support that GitHub classroom had where the first student to accept the assignment in the group created a group name for everyone else to join.