Compare professor ratings right next to their class offerings
Have you ever checked RateMyProfessor or PlanetTerp while picking your classes? I would bet money that you have. I know there is nothing I hate more than taking a class with a bad professor.
Now, with this Chrome Extension, you don't even have to leave the page to get professor ratings. You can easily choose the right classes for you and be confident that you will enjoy the professor.
- Google Chrome Extensions
- Javascript
- Ajax
- JQuery
- MutationObserver
- API Calls (PlanetTerp)
Completed
- Fork it (https://github.com/matthewfoulk/cuttle/fork)
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b feature/fooBar) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some fooBar') - Push to the branch (
git push origin feature/fooBar) - Create a new Pull Request
Matthew Foulk – LinkedIn – [email protected]
1/11/23 updates by Forrest Milner – LinkedIn – [email protected]
Distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.
Start Date: 12/10/2020
End Date: 12/11/2020
I pick 100% of my classes based on the quality of professors because they make or break a class. I had just finsihed registering for the spring semester and realized how often I would choose a class, then look at the professor's ratings on another site, only to find out that they well... uh... sucked. So I knew, if onlyfor my sake, I need to the simplify this process.
Similar to my Cuttle project this morphed from discussions my sister Kelly Foulk and I had trying to come up with a partner project. The original idea revolved around a Flask application and web-scraping, but onceI thought about it I realized that it made much more sense to keep the ratings on the same page as students typically visit. That could mean only one thing: Javascipt, one of my many old enemies, second only to CSS.
I have never really used Javascript minus one or two things I did for the Harvard CS50 introductory course, but I remeber the syntax being confusing. So going into the project I was a little worried that I was going to struggle. Thank god I've been taking Java classes because, although different, I felt I had a much better appreciation for the syntax and was able to grasp the basic concepts rather quickly.
I brushed up on some other old buzzwords I could barely remember like JQuery and Ajax, still not completely onboard with how those two work but I found them massively helpful. The most difficult challenge of the entire project was understanding how something (aka Ajax) could run asynchronously and screw the whole order of my program. It baffled my mind that a single thread could find a way to basically run two things at once.
I'd like to give a big shoutout to Google for making the Chrome Extension process super simple. I basically slapped a manifest.json file ontop of it all and wallah it worked. Also the testing and publishing process could not have been simpler.
I don't have any desire to expand beyond the simple benefits this application provides, but if I were to give it some thought there are a few improvements I would make. First, I would make it easier to distingiush between good professors and bad professors possibly with some sort of color scale. Second, I would provide some way to filter class/teacher offerings based on their rankings. Third, I would improve basic functionality like providing user feedback even when no rating is found such as "N/A" and better handling of courses being taught by two professors. Finally, if I'm shooting for the moon it would be awesome to provide some required classes and minimum teacher ratings then formulate a schedule for a student.
All-in-all, this was a fun project that produced something really useful and taught me several skills I had little to no experience, all the while taking almost no time.