Professor Frosh

The ultimate tool first year engineering students need to excel academically by giving unbiased opinions on their courses and professors.

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Inspiration

Before starting Engineering at UofT, Sanaz wanted a way to learn more about her future professors to make informed decisions during course selection. This need inspired the creation of Professor Frosh. Existing review platforms often fall short because they give equal weight to all reviews, regardless of when they were written, and tend to attract extreme opinion, overly negative or overly positive, skewing the "true" rating of the teaching experience. Even after choosing and starting courses, she noticed that many students (including herself) did not want to read the syllabus, despite there being crucial information on deadlines and submission policy for assignments and exams. Both these issues required a platform to provide up-to-date, unbiased data and analysis to better improve her chances of achieving a high GPA.

What it does

Professor Frosh is a website designed specifically for UofT Engineering students to navigate their first-year courses. It organizes professor information by course, providing concise, web-sourced reviews in a single paragraph. Professor Frosh also has a syllabus summarizer, which extracts the most important policies and key dates from the PDF syllabus. This addresses a common issue where students often avoid reading the syllabus, despite it being crucial for their success in the course.

In addition, Professor Frosh helps students stay on top of their courses by allowing them to upload their syllabi. The website extracts and summarizes key details, including important dates and course policies, ensuring nothing is overlooked (many students do not typically read the syllabus). Essentially, the website serves two purposes: helping students make informed decisions before course selection and keeping them organized after the term begins.

How we built it

We took inspiration from other professor review websites, and enhanced their features, such as a general overview of what students say about the professor, and keeping reviews more up-to-date, by prioritizing reviews based on factors such as recency.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge we encountered was images not properly displaying or specific data, such as ratings, even though the code format in javascript was identical to the rest of the sections. Additionally, we faced difficulties integrating the backend components of the file upload and file reader with the website's frontend. From seeking help from mentors, listening to feedback and committing to work through the challenges we were able to overcome these challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For many of our team members, this was their first time developing code for real-world use. Ensuring the platform was user-friendly while offering true value to users was a significant achievement. We hope that Professor Frosh becomes a go-to resource for incoming UofT Engineering first-years.

What we learned

We focused on learning how to effectively use APIs to successfully implement PDF scraping for extracting syllabus information and developing an aesthetic front end for users.

What's next for Professor Frosh

In the future, we will expand Professor Frosh to be the ultimate one-stop platform for incoming first-year students. Our plans include adding past exams, average grades, and other academic data to provide students with a more comprehensive understanding of their courses. This will give them a clearer picture of what to expect and practical tools to prepare, moving beyond the vague advice of "university will be more difficult." We also plan on expanding the website for upper year students, as they have more liberty in choosing their courses and their professors.

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