Course Wizard

Inspiration

Choosing classes can be highly uncertain and highly unfair. Students are faced with little to no information about which professors and courses are high quality. Additionally, for some university-wide courses like English Composition, median GPA varies as widely as .75 grade points; some students are faced with a vastly more difficult course but are then compared like the class has equal difficulty.

What it does

Our website is like RateMyProfessor except it has vastly more data. Students can find median GPA a for for courses and professors they're interested in. Making this data readily available will influence students to stay clear of low quality courses and professors as well as those that grade unfairly low. This will hold the university accountable for its courses: professors will notice students steering clear of their boring or unreasonable courses.

How we built it

We obtained median GPA for every course at UW in the last two years through FOIA and scraped additional data from past course catalogs. Data scraping and wrangling was done in python and the web server is mostly javascript.

Challenges we ran into

The data we obtained through FOIA did not contain which professor taught the class, only the course title and quarter. Additionally we were super rusty on web dev so creating the website took a lot of tinkering.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Obtaining and wrangling the data was somewhat of a feat and took many hours.

What we learned

It would have been helpful if we took the time to learn web development more thoroughly before diving in full force; we wasted a lot of time on javascript-related issues and the like.