Reuse Dropproject Assignment

Reusing a Drop Project assignment from a previous year

Teachers rarely write an assignment from scratch twice. The usual flow at the start of a school year is to take last year's assignment, copy its repository into this year's organization (e.g. ULHT-LP2-2025-26 -> ULHT-LP2-2026-27) and recreate the assignment against the copy.

There is no "duplicate assignment" button, and there cannot be one: an assignment's git repository url can't be changed after creation, and its id is unique per Drop Project instance. So reusing is always creating a new assignment out of two things copied by hand:

Drop Project copies neither. If you are not reusing anything, use the create-dropproject-assignment skill instead - this one assumes the previous edition exists and already passed validation.

Before you start

Ask for whatever is missing - do not invent them:

• which assignment is being reused (search_assignments finds it by name, id or tag)
• this year's organization, and whether the repository keeps the same name
• the new assignment id and name
• the new due date
• this year's authorized students, if the old assignment restricts who may submit
• this year's teaching team
• what should happen to last year's assignment

1. Read the previous assignment's configuration

get_assignment_info on the old assignment prints a ## Configuration section where every setting is named after the create_assignment argument that sets it, gitRepositoryUrl included. Keep that block around - it is what you pass back in step 4, and it tells you which repository to copy.

Settings the old assignment doesn't use are reported as not set rather than omitted, so a value you can't find there is a value the assignment genuinely didn't have. Do not guess the ones that matter for grading: an assignment that silently loses acceptsStudentTests or hiddenTestsVisibility still validates, still activates, and grades the students differently from last year.

The block is a starting point, not something to paste back unchanged - assignees and acl list last year's people, and step 4 says what to do about them.

2. Copy the repository

gh repo create <NEW_ORG>/<repo> --private
git clone git@github.com:<OLD_ORG>/<repo>.git <repo>
cd <repo>
git remote set-url origin git@github.com:<NEW_ORG>/<repo>.git
git push -u origin HEAD

Keep the history - git log is where you find the fixes that were pushed mid-semester last year.

Do not fork, and do not point the new assignment at last year's repository. The two editions must be independent: a push meant for this year's students would otherwise also change last year's assignment, whose submissions were graded against the old tests.

Note the SSH url of the copy, git@github.com:<NEW_ORG>/<repo>.git. Drop Project rejects https urls.

3. Adjust the copy for the new edition

Everything that mentions the previous edition has to be reviewed:

• instructions.md - dates, deadlines, the year, the course edition, links to class materials
• pom.xml - the artifact id or version, if it carries the year
• the exercise itself - last year's students kept the statement and may have published their solutions. If that matters for this assignment, change the input data, the expected values, or add TestTeacherHidden* tests. Adding hidden tests for the first time means also passing hiddenTestsVisibility when creating the assignment.

Verify locally before pushing, then commit and push:

mvn -q test -Ddp.argLine=

4. Register the new assignment

Call create_assignment with a new assignment id - follow the previous convention, e.g. lp2-2526-proj1 -> lp2-2627-proj1. Reusing last year's id is refused ("An assignment already exists with this ID").

Pass gitRepositoryUrl of the copy, and repeat every setting collected in step 1. Anything left out falls back to Drop Project's default - nothing is inherited from the old assignment. Update along the way:

assignees and acl are the two settings never to copy. The people change with the edition, and both are lists of user ids:

• assignees is a whitelist. As soon as an assignment has one, only those user ids can open it and submit to it - whatever the visibility is. Carrying last year's over admits students who finished the course and locks out the ones taking it.
• acl is the other teachers who may open the assignment and its submissions. The teaching team usually changes too, and the ones who left keep access until someone notices.

Ask for both. If this year's enrolment list isn't out yet, create the assignment with a provisional whitelist - the teaching team - rather than last year's students, and replace it later with edit_assignment. Nothing is lost by waiting, since the assignment only accepts submissions once it is activated. A PRIVATE assignment cannot be created with an empty whitelist at all ("For PRIVATE assignments, you have to fill in the authorized submitters").

The tool returns a new ssh public key. Each assignment gets its own key pair, so last year's deploy key gives no access to the copy.

5. Install the deploy key on the copy

gh repo deploy-key add <key file> --repo <NEW_ORG>/<repo> --title "Drop Project"

Read-only, as always. Without gh, paste it at https://github.com/<NEW_ORG>/<repo>/settings/keys leaving write access unchecked.

6. Connect and validate

connect_assignment, then loop on the validation report - fix, push, refresh_assignment - until it has no errors. The create-dropproject-assignment skill explains the report entries in detail.

Stop there: do not activate the new assignment on your own. A clean report means it is ready, not that it should open. Tell the teacher it is validated and inactive, and call set_assignment_active with active: true only when they ask for it.

The repository passed validation last year, so anything reported here comes from what changed in step 3 or from a setting that was not carried over. The two that show up most often:

7. Retire the previous edition

Once the teacher opens the new edition, last year's should stop accepting submissions. Ask before doing either - closing an assignment that students are still submitting to is not something to guess at:

• set_assignment_active with active: false closes it
• archiving it hides it from the teacher's assignment list, at <drop project>/assignment/archive/<oldId> in the web ui - there is no MCP tool for it

Neither deletes anything: the old submissions, reports and grades stay available.

Notes

• Never ask for, or handle, the private key of either assignment. It is generated inside Drop Project and stays there.
• Drop Project does not poll the repositories. Every later edit to this year's files means push, then refresh_assignment.
• Submissions already evaluated are never re-evaluated, in either edition.