HackThisBot in action: an automated reply to a comment on Reddit.

RedditProfessor

Authors:

Tejesh Bhaumik - tejeshb2@illinois.edu
Om Bhatt - ombb2@illinois.edu
Aniruddha G Pai - agpai2@illinois.edu

About

A Reddit bot that displays information about the professor of a given course. This information provided will include the class rating, difficulty of the class, and the percentage of students taking the class again.

Summon by commenting !prof <class subject> <class title> to get the reviews of UIUC professors teaching any particular class, or commenting !prof under a post which contains a course name in its body.

The UIUC subreddit is the biggest university subreddit in the U.S., with thousands of students asking about course advice, schedule checks and professor experiences every day. With the theme of this hackathon being about education, I felt that adding a practical feature to such an educational subreddit would be perfect. RateMyProfessor is used by college students all across the country to share their learning preferences, and the professor-student dynamic has become increasingly important in a virtual college setting.

Being a premier public university, many UIUC professors have amassed student reviews, and we think that new students could benefit from the advice of their senior peers catalogued on their site. With such a strong correlation of RateMyProfessor and the topics discussed on r/UIUC, we are optimistic that the ability to quickly see instructor ratings by simply calling our bot is a convenient and helpful addition to the subreddit and UIUC students as a whole.

Documentation

This codebase follows the Google Python Style Guide. This style guide is a list of dos and don’ts for Python programs, and also lists example to show best coding practices.

Built With

Submitted to

HackThis

Created by

I contributed in adding the bot summon method which specifies a course name in a comment, and helped fix a bug of the bot re-replying to the same comment/older comments. I assisted in testing and found the CSV file for our bot to pull data from.

OmBhatt9 Bhatt
I implemented the Rate My Professor Web Scraper and the reddit bot, specifically the interaction with the Reddit Api, and the logic behind the !prof command to pull all the information from the reddit post and the !prof class command (I was helped in the last one by my teammates). I also implemented features like multiple comments and comment skipping. I optimized the code by used the specific data structures such as lists and sets for iteration and checking respectively. Helped in refactoring and checking.

Tejesh2001
I implemented the courses class, which reads and gathers data from the .csv file and stores it in a list. I also contributed in effective refactoring and working of code. Provided ideas for the functioning of the bot, and fixed bugs when required. Ensured that the code written, followed the Google Python style guide for better readability.

Aniruddha Pai