Classroom assignment provisioning: 37% failure rate across 2,589 acceptances this semester — mechanism and evidence

[kangwonlee]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

GitHub Classroom

Hi everyone,

Hi — I run an undergrad coding course at an engineering college with 5 sections and ~180+ enrolled students across introductory Python and numerical methods. I use GitHub Classroom to distribute ~10 assignments per section per semester, and I track every acceptance via an actions-collector script that snapshots repo state.

This semester (2026 spring) I'm seeing a provisioning failure rate high enough that I want to surface it to the community, because the student-facing effect is visible and the fix (repeated re-accepting → duplicate -N repos → manual instructor cleanup) is burning real hours.

The numbers

Across 2,589 assignment acceptances in 5 cohorts this semester:

Cohort	Acceptances	Failed first-try (retries)	Rate
Freshman section A (Wed 7-8)	572	225	39.3%
Freshman section B (Wed 3-4)	704	234	33.2%
Freshman section C (Tue 5-6)	572	224	39.2%
Freshman section D (Mon 6-7)	408	136	33.3%
Junior section (Mon)	333	146	43.8%
Total	2,589	965	37.3%

On individual assignments the failure rate exceeds 50% — including on recent prompt-only and optimization assignments.

What's mechanically happening

After a student clicks "Accept assignment", GitHub Classroom appears to run three sequential writes:

1. Generate repo from template — typically succeeds
2. Write the due-date metadata (a commit to REAME.md on the new repo)
3. Add the student as a collaborator (PUT /repos/{org}/{repo}/collaborators/{login})

Steps 2 and 3 seems to be the failure points. Every one of 103 confirmed orphan repos in one of my cohorts this week shows the same fingerprint:

• Exactly 1 commit (the initial template fork) of head sha from the starter template at release time
• No student as collaborator
• Commit author is github-classroom[bot], message is "Initial commit"

So step 2 never ran (no due-date commit ever appeared), and step 3 never added the student. The student sees an inaccessible empty repo, clicks Accept again, and GH Classroom generates <username>-1, then -2, etc. — each retry running through the same flaky pipeline.

Instructor-side cost

Roughly 500 manual repo deletions this 1/2 semester to keep the cohort rosters interpretable.

Asks

1. RCA on step-2 (due-date write) and step-3 (collaborator add) intermittent failures. These look like race conditions (write to a newly-created repo before some backend replica catches up) or abuse-detection throttling. Either way, the retry pattern is inside Classroom's implementation — students don't have visibility to mitigate.
2. Expose a "resolve duplicates" UI for instructors. The consolidation logic is deterministic — latest -N suffix wins, with carry-over of student commits — and Classroom already has the data to do it.
3. Acknowledge the numbers. Even if the underlying GitHub API reliability is out of Classroom's control, the community would benefit from a status statement: "yes, this is real; we're tracking it; here's an ETA."

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