In rev 27891 of the Gradebook, a "category" property (with "setCategory(Category)" and "getCategory()" methods) was added to the Assignment object. The Hibernate mapping uses it as a foreign key to the Category table.

In rev 29400, a boolean method named "isCategory()" was added to Assignment, CourseGrade, and their superclass GradableObject. In all cases, the method always returns "false".

The "isCategory" may have been left over from some earlier idea for implementing assignment categories. However, it doesn't serve any purpose currently, and it introduces a destructive bug: Spring + Hibernate will sometimes rightly try to map a category field to "getCategory()" (expecting a Category object), but will sometimes wrongly map it to "isCategory()" (expecting a boolean value).

I'm marking this as critical due to the difficulty of debugging the error when it occurs.