I only made these changes to fit what is common in the community. With a model scope, it usually returns multiple items so it's ideal to have the scope address it as plural. So it would be "user.tasks.need_student_attention" instead of "user.tasks.needs_student_attention", which doesn't read as well. Now, in the case where this were a single task and a method was needed on the task to determine the same thing, you could define a method "def needs_student_attention?", and it would be used "user.task.first.needs_student_attention?". It all functions the same regardless of naming, but it's an easy tweak to make at this point in the project, so I tweaked it.