Bug in reusing assignments

[sigged]

Hi everyone,

We are trying to adapt our workflow to embrace the new assignment creation. Because we need multiple copies of the same assignment, we are considering "reuse assignment".
However, this seems broken now. After selecting a different classroom and clicking "Reuse", we get the following error: "Unexpected token '<', "<!doctype "... is not valid JSON"

Update: reusing seems to work fine when selection a different organisation. But that won't do for our workflow.

[MiguelCardoso19]

Try clearing your browser cache or using a different browser. If that doesn’t help, you may need to manually duplicate the assignment until GitHub fixes the issue. If the problem persists, contacting GitHub Support is your best option.

[sigged]

Cleared cache and used a different browser.

Seems like the issue is caused by a 404. When clicking "Reuse", a GET request is issued to the future location of the cloned assignment, which, at this point does not exist yet. I will try GitHub support.

[Shakattack76]

Ty

[slovak-edhouse]

Hi all, I have also problem with assignment reuse in GitHub classroom. Reuse of assignments is not working, but I get different error: "JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data".

I try different browsers (FF and Chrome) with the same result.

[nimonian]

Exact same problem here, thought I was losing my mind as it was working recently. A bug must have been introduced by a recent update.

I agree with @sigged that the problem occurs because a GET request is being made to the (as yet uncreated) target assignment URL.

This is a pretty significant issue for us as we have a cohort starting very soon.

[Ujoa]

Agreed. Encountering this now after returning from Tuesday's fiasco of classrooms failing. Seems like website is still unstable and this is concerning.

[nimonian]

I found out what the issue is.

If you try to reuse an assignment into a classroom within the same organisation, it will fail.

If you reuse an assignment into a classroom in a different organisation, it will succeed.

It seems like Github are trying to force us to use "one classroom per org" which is not how we use it, and I imagine there are many people who have many classrooms per org and want to reuse assignments between them.

[beak85]

Same issue with one of my assignments. I then tried with another similar assignment and it worked fine. Went back to the first and still the same error. I wonder if there is something within the assignment repo that causes it. I used the same settings in each assignment except for the name and starting repo.

[Ujoa]

@github-staff this issue is still occurring.

[Ujoa]

After clearing cache and browser, as suggested above, the issue is still occurring. Here's a network log (hopefully this helps)

[nimonian]

I found out what the issue is.

If you try to reuse an assignment into a classroom within the same organisation, it will fail.

If you reuse an assignment into a classroom in a different organisation, it will succeed.

It seems like Github are trying to force us to use "one classroom per org" which is not how we use it, and I imagine there are many people who have many classrooms per org and want to reuse assignments between them.

[nimonian]

Oh it gets better

So the assignment has stalled at being created in the separate org

And the base repo has been duplicated FIVE TIMES in the target organisation with a random id added to the slug

I'm... at the point of giving up

[Ujoa]

yeah looks like assignment reuse is not feasible anymore. when it used to work.

[sierrajulietromeo]

Any news on this? Still not working as of yesterday.

[khammami]

I am experiencing the same issue when you try to reuse one assignment. It appears to be related to the new method GitHub Classroom uses to create assignments with starter code. The process requires a public template to create a copy under your organization. However, this copy is just a normal repository and not a template, and it can be private if you change the assignment's visibility. Therefore, when we use the 'reuse' feature, it likely checks if the starter code is a template, causing it to fail.

update:

Here is what I get when I try to use the copied repo from a previous assignment in a new assignment

[scmurdock]

You are correct! This solved our issue, thank you so much. We can't say how much time it will save our school.

[khammami]

I'm glad to hear that :)

[tturin1017]

I am new to github classrooms so my apologies for not understanding. Are you saying that in order for the reuse assignment feature to work, we must have our starter code be from a private template? I thought a starter template could not only be public.
Thank you! @khammami

[joshuaguerin]

You are still helping people in 2026!

[saniales]

Just want to point out that this is still not working and same error keep appearing as everyone else here

[vindiarputra]

[tturin1017]

Hi, I believe I have seen this reponse before. Unfortunately, I am not able to solve the issue with it.

[brantfaircloth]

The @github support for critical issues this like this one is woefully inadequate. This bug continues to impact re-using assignments (something that is pretty critical to the operation of a classroom) with no suggestions/fixes from @github...

Similar to others, I am also stuck with the Unexpected token error when attempting to re-use an assignment.

[gublan24]

Hi guys. I am encountering the same error.

You can create a temp classroom in a new organization to reuse the assignment there. Then, from the new classroom, you can reuse it back to the original classroom.

I did it, still there some errors.

[bharlowRHC]

I admitted defeat and gave up.

I have run into both issues here that @sigged and @nimonian have described. I do not have time to troubleshoot due to the fires that started a few hours after my GitHub Classroom duplicated a single assignment 26 times at the beginning of January 2025. Over a month later I finally found a few minutes to check it, and it says that the assignment still says it has not completed the copy at least it stopped at 26 duplications.

I am a big advocate of learning to use version control for my students. However, because of continued issues like this coupled with my newfound severe lack of time while dealing with recovery, my students will lose out on learning experiences such as GitHub Classroom assignments until I get more time to troubleshoot and deal with "workarounds".

[MrDGuy]

Here is a quick work-around from @khammami. Thank you for taking the time to figure this out. When I go to the assignment repository, which has been named something like org-name/class-name-assignment-name, I then change this to a template and then I can re-use it for other classes of the same organization.

[kootsoop]

Thank-you! That seems to resolve it for me, too. When creating the initial assignments, the starter repository had to be a template... but the assignment creation seems to make a new repository that is NOT a template. Making the previous class's starter repositories templates manually has been fixing it for me.

[schrum2]

Agreed. As of today (July 3, 2025) the error still happens when you try to reuse an assignment. Note also that if you try to reuse the assignment from the overall classroom listing rather than the specific assignment, then the process fails silently rather than give the invalid JSON error above. However, by going into the starter repository actually tied to the assignment and making it a template, the reuse option worked.

Just to clarify for anyone still confused: the original repo that you made the assignment from and the starter repo for some past assignment you've used are actually different things. My original repo was already a template, but when you create a new assignment that uses such a repo as its template, another repo is made that is the actual starter repo for the assignment, so you have to go in and turn that repo into a template in the settings.

Incidentally, this particular "fix" means that the new assignment is actually tied to the starter repo from the old version of the assignment, so if the original root assignment that was used to make that first assignment has changed, then those changes will not be reflected in the new assignment you've made ... hope that makes sense.

Not sure why this is so hard for GitHub to fix ...

[jteno]

Thanks for your post. . Aye this was very confusing. I got this to work by going to the assignment in my old classroom that I wanted to reuse, and changing the assignment type to template. Initially I didn't get any errors when just creating a new classroom and selecting to reuse all the assignments from my old classroom. The new classroom just opened without any assignments.

After setting the assignment that you want to use from and old classroom to "template" type, reusing the assignment in a new classroom works. The new assignment in the new classroom is still linked to the original template source repository where the assignment was originally made from.

Don't know if this helps or confuses more but:

1. New classroom -> reuse assignment -> new repo for assignment from old classroom -> that is linked to original source template in original classroom
2. Old classroom -> original assigment that you want to reuse in the new classroom (you must make this a template!) -> link to original source template repository.

[saniales]

As of today (October 15th, 2025) the error persists and is not fixed

[jteno]

I'm running into problems when trying to reuse a group assignment. I think it has to do with the fact that there might not be a group created in the new classroom. As a workaround i tried to create a new group assignment and a group in the classroom as i was suspecting that this was the cause for the problems, but this didn't work.

Has anyone figured out what the problem is with reusing group assignments?

[menotti]

As of today (January 23, 2026), the error persists and has not been corrected.