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๐ŸŽ‰ 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 theyโ€™ve done in other courses.

This feature has been in the works for a long time, and Iโ€™m proud with how itโ€™s come along. In past blog posts, Iโ€™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 professorโ€™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. ๐Ÿ’•

Austin Jackson