🎉 0.4.0 Update: Instructor search is now available
At long last, the Instructor search is here.
Interested in taking a course but none of the instructors that are offerred have a history of teaching that course before? Well, now you can learn more about their background within the university and see how they’ve done in other courses.
This feature has been in the works for a long time, and I’m proud with how it’s come along. In past blog posts, I’ve talked briefly about some of the behind-the-scenes work made along the way, such as with the database upgrades necessary to make the front-end possible.
Pictured below is an example of an Instructor search result. The labels above the professor’s name is both the GPA and the standard deviation respectively for the professor in question. The colors of the labels, inspired by AggieScheduler, are indicative of the score. An A average is blue, a B average is green, a C average is yellow, and a D average is orange.
Preventing arbitrary thresholds in the color indication
To prevent the standard deviation thresholds from being biased or misleading, I created a frequency distribution and decided to use the probability mass function to estimate when the cut-off should be. The results were pretty informative.
For the standard deviation values of all instructors (latest data: Summer 2019)
- min:
0.0007071067811864697 - mean:
0.28632900784232573 - median:
0.24911322128640845 - max:
1.6836212460051696 - 25% likely to have stddev under 0.149
- 50% likely to have stddev under 0.286
- 75% likely to have stddev under 0.425
Thank you
Thank you for all the support and I hope you enjoy the new update. 💕
Austin Jackson