Forming Groups
What your instructor configured wins. This page describes how Pawtograder behaves in the setup most courses use. Almost every rule below is a per-assignment or per-course setting, and your instructor chose the settings for your course on purpose, as part of how they want the course to run. So if your assignment behaves differently from what you read here, the most likely reason is that your course is set up differently, by design. Your assignment page and your course’s own policies are the authority on what applies to you. Ask your course staff if you are not sure, or if what you see looks wrong rather than merely different.
Overview
Pawtograder supports two kinds of group assignments:
- Group optional: students can choose to work alone, or form a group.
- Group required: students must form a group.
The assignment page says which kind you are looking at, and how big the group has to be: “This is a group assignment.” with “You must be part of a group with N members to submit this assignment”, or “This is a group-optional assignment.” with “You can submit this assignment individually or as part of a group with N members.” The size is written as a single number, “at most N”, “at least N”, a range, or “any amount of”, depending on what your instructor set.
The page also tells you who does the forming. If you see Create a new group and Join a group buttons, you form your own group, and the rest of this page is for you. If instead there are no buttons and the page reads “Your instructor will assign you to a group. Please wait for your group assignment.” — or, on a group-optional assignment, “Your instructor may assign you to a group, or you may submit individually — please follow instructor instructions.” — your instructor forms the groups, and there is nothing for you to do here.
Pawtograder uses an invitation system for group formation: students can create new groups, invite other students to join, and accept or reject invitations. Invitations and join requests also go out by email.
If group submissions are optional and you already have an individual submission for the assignment, joining a group deactivates that submission. Your individual repository is not deleted; repository permissions are re-synced so that you can work in the group’s repository.
Creating a New Group
Click Create a new group to open the Create a new group dialog. Pick a good name: other students will use this name to find your group, and instructors will use this name to identify the group. The name must consist only of alphanumeric characters, hyphens, or underscores, and be at most 36 characters long.
Optionally, you can invite other students to join your group right as you create it. They will be notified by email, and can accept or reject the invitation.
After creating the group, you can still invite more students to it later.
Managing Your Group
Once you’re in a group, the assignment page reads “You are in group name” and lists everyone in it. Click Invite other students to send more invitations or to see the invitations that are still outstanding.
If another student asks to join your group, their request appears in the group details under Approve or decline join requests, and any member of the group can Approve or Reject it.
Leave group removes you from the group. Confirming it warns you that you will no longer be able to submit as part of that group, that a submission you have already made as a group will no longer be associated with your account, and that your groupmates and the instructor are notified of your departure.
If your instructor has assigned a mentor to your group, the group details show Group mentor: and the mentor’s name. Instructors can hand grading out by group mentor, so your mentor may be the person who grades your group’s submissions.
Joining a Group
To join a group or accept an invitation, click Join a group on the assignment page. The dialog is titled Find a group to join, and it opens by listing the three ways in: by accepting an invitation from another student, by sending a request to join a group and having it approved, or by creating your own group.
Invitations you have received are listed first, each with Accept and Decline. Accepting adds you to the group straight away. There is no approval step, because someone in that group already invited you.
Under Select a group to request to join you can pick any other group and press Request to Join Group. That sends a request, which a member of the group has to approve before you are added. Groups that already have the maximum number of members cannot be selected. You can request several groups at once, in which case you are added to the first one that accepts.
Requests you have already sent appear under Prior Join Requests, with the group’s current member count and the request’s status. A request that is still pending has a Withdraw button, though the group may already have been notified that you asked to join.
Your instructor can set a deadline for forming groups. Once it passes, the Create a new group and Join a group buttons are replaced by “The group formation deadline has passed. You will not be able to join a group for this assignment.”
The deadline is enforced on the server, and it closes every group action, not just joining: after it passes you cannot create a group, join one, approve someone else’s request, or leave the group you are in. If you need to change groups after the deadline, ask your instructor.
Group Notifications
You are notified when you’re invited to a group, when someone joins or leaves your group, and when someone requests to join it. Each of those also has an email version, so whether you get an email depends on your notification preferences.
Group notifications are suppressed for assignments that have not been released yet. Instructors often set groups up in advance, and you won’t hear about any of it until the assignment is released to you.
