Inspiration

Planning a degree at a business school means juggling a catalog PDF, a four-year-plan sheet, a prerequisite chain, and a handful of "ask your advisor" caveats. Students find out they're a semester behind when a prerequisite they skipped blocks the course they need. We wanted one place that answers three questions honestly: What do I still need? When can I realistically graduate? What changes if I change my mind?

We built Purple Pathway for TCU Neeley School of Business students. We also made a rule early: the tool must never invent an answer. If TCU's requirements for something haven't been verified, it says so instead of guessing.

What it does

Graduation dashboard: progress by requirement area, credits completed, in progress and remaining, and an earliest-graduation estimate.
Semester planner: a term-by-term plan that respects prerequisites, offering patterns and credit-load policy. It shows which courses are bottlenecks and what a one-semester slip would cost.
Course recommendations: green, yellow and red labels per term, each with the reasons behind it.
Schedule Explorer: a weekly calendar with conflict detection.
What-If planner: add a minor, change course load, study abroad, or take an accounting pathway, and compare the plan before and after. The original plan is never overwritten.
Start your own plan: pick your major, enter coursework by hand or import a transcript (PDF or CSV), then review and confirm every row before anything is used.
Advisor: explains results in plain language using the same engines. It is a deterministic explainer, not a live AI chatbot.

How we built it

We split the project into three parts that never reach into each other:

Academic data: structured JSON for degree requirements, courses, prerequisites, policies and sources. Every record carries provenance: its source, date verified, and a status of confirmed, derived, conflict, unverified or assumption. A SHA-256 manifest protects the files, so a visual tweak can't silently change a requirement.
Planning engines: plain JavaScript modules that read only that data, covering the audit, the semester planner, recommendations and What-If. Prerequisites are evaluated as true, false or unknown, so missing information stays visible.
UI: React and Tailwind, loaded as static files. It displays engine results and contains no academic rules; an automated architecture test fails the build if a requirement leaks into UI code.

It deploys as a static site on Netlify, with no database and no server functions. Transcripts are read in the browser and never uploaded.

For credit math we keep attempted and earned hours separate and count each course once:

$$\text{remaining} = \max\bigl(0,\; R - E - P\bigr)$$

where $R$ is the required total, $E$ the earned credits and $P$ the in-progress credits. TCU's own sources disagree on $R$ (120 vs 124 hours), so the tool shows both rather than choosing one.

Challenges

Sources that disagree. Catalog pages, checklists and archived catalogs conflict in places. We record these as explicit conflicts in the data and surface them to the student instead of resolving them quietly.
Honesty versus completeness. Only Business Information Systems and the BBA core are fully auditable. Other majors, minors and certificates show their recorded structure but are clearly labeled as not yet audited.
"Unknown" is a real answer. A plan with an unschedulable required course (a study-abroad-only class) is reported as undetermined, not falsely "on track."
No live AI without a server. We chose not to fake it. The advisor's numbers come from the engines, which is why they can be trusted.
Real transcripts are messy. TCU transcripts use two columns, continue terms across pages, and separate attempted from earned credit. Parsing them accurately without guessing took careful design and a review step.

What we learned

Trust comes from showing the limits as clearly as the results. Keeping data, logic and design separate let us iterate on the look daily without risking a wrong graduation date. Tests that pin the verified data and refuse to let the UI compute rules paid for themselves repeatedly.

What's next

Load verified requirements for every Neeley major, minor and certificate; replace sample class sections with real schedule data; and add a secure server-side AI advisor once an API key and backend are appropriate.

Purple Pathway is an independent student project, not an official TCU tool. It does not clear anyone for graduation. Confirm everything with an advisor.