KnowYourCourseLoad

Courseload
Most helpful reviews

Inspiration

The previous semester that was online for the most of us had an unprecedented difficulty in terms of course load and while individual courses did not seem daunting, a combination of them definitely harmed the mental health of many people we spoke to. So hopefully, through this, people can know what they're getting into, and have an emotionally healthy semester :)

What it does

Based on correct entry of data, the applications fetches the corresponding difficulty ratings for the data entered. Upon entering a full schedule, the total difficulty is assessed based on our own algorithms (and indivual). The algorithms take into account the number of negative, positive reviews, external ratings, course level, historic difficulty, the instructor etc. We use semantic analysis to determine if a course is manageable or not.

How we built it

We used a ReactJS frontend connected with a Python backend using a REST API made with Flask. Under the hood, there are nlp, and web scraping algorithms to analyze and fetch data, respectively. The analysis is then used as inputs for our algorithm that calculates a difficulty rating that is then displayed on the web app under 'Difficulty Meter.'

Challenges we ran into

The foremost challenge was that we had 24 hours to learn how to build an end-to-end web app from scratch that used comprehensive ML algorithms(NLP). In essence, everything we used (expect maybe the languages) was foreign to us in the sense that getting the whole to be greater than sum of parts was difficult . We had to learn how to webscrape Reddit and rate my prof, use nlp for semantic analysis to determine whether a course is manageable or not, combine React.js(and various other front-end frameworks) and Python code using flask by creating a REST API. Additionally, choosing good training and testing data, and training a good model was challenging as well as none of us had any experience with NLP. Lastly, we had to make an algorithm to assign weights and properly assess how different factors effected the overall difficulty of the course, and their amalgamated schedule.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to learn and implement all of the above within 24 hours :)

What we learned

Connecting a python backend with a React fronted, building a REST API, semantic analysis using python, web scraping, formulating our own algorithm and mathematical formulae to assess the effects of different factors

What's next for KnowYourCourseLoad

Introducing caching to scale the web app, add personalised gpa features, enhancing the nlp model to classify more classes, and potentially extend it to all the universities in the world :D