Do a code review on a whole project without a pull request

Question

I am teaching programming and I would like to review/comment my student's code.

The easy way to do it would be to create a pull request, but when students are beginners, they are not familiar with branches, and so it's not that easy for them.

There are already questions like that but they don't have answers and are a bit different, for ex this one is about reviewing changes and not a a whole project.

I would preferably like a solution using Github, which I think at the moment is not possible as it is an open issue, but I am open to hacky solution, or other tools. The important is just the ability to comment code by line.

The solution I am looking for needs to:

• Allow adding comments on every line of all the files of one branch or master
• Not require pull request
• Not require comparing branches
• Not require installing another software than Git

Answer 1

Using Github and a single branch as you stipulate you could create issues for each of your comments, linking them to the lines or blocks of code in question. You can do this by highlighting the code and copying the updated url to a created issue or using the dropdown to Reference in new issue. This keeps the code un-altered and can all be done/viewed in the github web interface.

You can create different issue labels to indicate the severity of the comment/issue.