ClassCompass: What’s Going On Here?

Welcome to the corner of the internet where Degree Works gets a glow-up. ClassCompass is a Chrome extension we hacked together at SBUHacks 2025 because staring at the stock Degree Works interface felt like reading hieroglyphics through a fogged-up window. The goal: hit one button, slurp up the audit HTML, convert it into real data, and present a slick dashboard that tells you, loudly and clearly, how close you are to graduating before your coffee cools.

Why it exists

Every semester students open Degree Works, squint, and try to decode which requirements are done, which ones are “in progress, we guess,” and which ones are non-starters. We wanted a tool that translates that chaos into structured JSON on demand, complete with student info, completed courses, unmet requirements, and nice progress visuals. ClassCompass handles the heavy lifting, so you can spend less time deciphering and more time, you know, not panicking.

How it does the trick

1. Popup scan button: The popup injects a content script into the active Degree Works tab, captures the DOM, and ships it to the background service worker.
2. Parsing pipeline: src/dashboard/converter.js tears through the captured HTML, extracting everything worth knowing—requirements, statuses, even those pesky unmet conditions.
3. Dashboard reveal: The cleaned-up data feeds into src/dashboard/index.html, which renders a red-themed progress board with hover states, drill-downs, and other niceties so you can see where you stand at a glance.

For tinkerers

Want to poke around? Load the repo as an unpacked extension, run the dashboard tooling with npm install inside src/dashboard if you’re tweaking that part, and open Chrome’s extension dev tools to watch the message passing between popup, background, and content scripts in real time. The dashboard also ships with a sample payload, so you can experiment without risking your actual audit.

The vibe

We kept the tone playful, but the data path is serious: content script → background storage → dashboard UI. Everything sits under the MIT License, which basically means “have fun, don’t sue us.” If you end up using ClassCompass to graduate faster, tell your advisor it was sheer determination—but maybe give us a wink in the acknowledgments.

Built With

• javascript