Compass: Helping Students Apply with Confidence

Inspiration

Applying to university in Singapore can be overwhelming. Admissions requirements, scholarships, financial aid, and application deadlines are spread across multiple university websites, PDFs, and portals. Many students eventually turn to forums and social media for answers, often without knowing whether the information is current or reliable.

We saw a gap: students didn't need more information—they needed information they could trust. This inspired us to build Compass, a platform focused on helping applicants make confident decisions based on verified sources.

---

What it does

Compass is a Singapore admissions reliability engine that helps students navigate the university application process with confidence. It consolidates admissions requirements, indicative grade profiles, scholarships, financial aid information, and application details from official university sources into a single platform. Unlike traditional admissions chatbots, Compass detects outdated information, flags conflicting sources, and provides evidence-backed answers with citations, allowing students to make informed decisions based on trustworthy information.

---

How we built it

Compass consolidates admissions information from official university sources and transforms it into structured, searchable guidance.

Key features include:

• Grounded Q&A based on official university sources
• Structured extraction of admissions requirements and applicant profiles
• Freshness detection to identify outdated information
• Conflict detection to flag inconsistent information across sources
• Evidence-backed responses with citations

Rather than giving definitive answers, Compass highlights uncertainty where appropriate, helping students make informed decisions.

---

Challenges we ran into

Defining the Right Problem

One of our biggest challenges was avoiding feature creep. Many ideas sounded exciting but did not directly address the core bottleneck. We had to constantly ask whether a feature helped students make more confident decisions.

Managing Information Reliability

Official information changes across admissions cycles and may appear in different formats. Designing a system that could identify outdated or conflicting information required us to think beyond a traditional chatbot experience.

Balancing Simplicity and Transparency

We wanted to provide clear answers while still showing users the evidence behind them. Striking this balance was critical to maintaining trust without overwhelming users.

---

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One accomplishment we are particularly proud of is reframing the problem from "finding admissions information" to "making confident application decisions." This helped us focus on solving the underlying bottleneck rather than simply building another information portal.

We are also proud of designing a reliability-first approach that prioritises transparency over certainty. Instead of presenting every answer as correct, Compass identifies conflicting or potentially outdated information and communicates uncertainty to users. This reflects real-world admissions scenarios and helps applicants avoid making decisions based on incomplete or stale information.

Finally, we successfully translated a complex and fragmented admissions landscape into a simple, intuitive user experience that aligns with the challenge theme of delivering outcomes rather than software.

---

What we learned

The biggest insight from this project was that the problem is not information scarcity, but information fragmentation.

Initially, we considered building features such as admissions prediction and course matching. However, after analysing the user journey, we realised the real job-to-be-done was:

Help students confidently decide where and how to apply.

This shifted our focus from building another admissions tool to creating a reliability engine.

---

What's next for Compass

Our next step is to expand the number of supported universities and admissions sources across Singapore. We plan to ingest additional admissions cycles, scholarship databases, and financial aid schemes to provide broader coverage and improve reliability.

We also aim to conduct user testing with polytechnic and junior college students to validate assumptions, gather feedback, and measure whether Compass improves confidence and reduces time spent searching for information.

In the longer term, we envision Compass becoming a trusted decision-support platform for students, parents, and school counsellors. Future enhancements may include personalised applicant profiles, application deadline tracking, and recommendation engines that remain grounded in verified data while preserving Compass' commitment to transparency and reliability.

Built With

• chromadb
• ollama
• ollama-with-all-minilm-(for-local-embeddings)-databases:-chromadb-(vector-database-for-retrieval)-libraries:-openai-python-sdk-(used-as-the-http-client-for-perplexity)
• openai
• perplexity
• python
• sdk
• streamlit