Intuition

Inspiration

Our data-powered degree plan advisor uses information from student reviews to develop a plan based on a student’s career interests, difficulty levels, and background. The student population is fast-growing, and given the diligence required in degree planning, relying solely on staff and faculty support is not sustainable. Students need a more personalised guide that will also ensure they stay on track for graduation.

What it does

The tool assists students in organising an initial draft of their degree plans by mapping out relationships between courses, including prerequisites, difficulty levels, and students' backgrounds and interests. It analyses these connections to suggest the best sequence of courses to take.

How we built it

We developed the application by mapping course relationships and career relevance from student reviews. The Depth First Traversal algorithm uses this data to recommend courses based on student interests and ensures graduation requirements are met.

Challenges

A major challenge was formalising the course recommendation process to meet school requirements without using artificial intelligence, while ensuring accurate and valuable student suggestions.

Accomplishments

We have developed a system that provides recommendations based on a student's career interests while ensuring they meet graduation requirements. Additionally, our discussions with faculty have provided valuable insights on how to make the system more generalizable.

What we learned

The team recognized the benefits of digitising course review collection and management. By transforming student feedback into structured data, the accuracy of the system’s recommendations improved. Furthermore, discussions with faculty revealed an interest in course analytics, particularly in understanding why students frequently drop courses, which could help address this recurring issue.

What's next for Division E

We plan to enhance the system by incorporating detailed course data and implementing a feature to gather student reviews. This will help rank courses based on career relevance, workload, and difficulty, improving the system’s accuracy and effectiveness. The academic and faculty advisors will also have access to each students’ plan in order to even use these to make recommendations to incoming students who have similar interests, skills levels etc, and the successes of those particular students.