CougarGrades.io Developer updates

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🔧 0.4.2 Update

This update fixes some issues with the site and more.

@cougargrades/web

  • Added support for native Dark Mode
  • Hopefully, eliminated some confusion between “UH GPA” and “Prof GPA” on Instructor page tables

🔧 0.4.1 Update

This update fixes some issues with the site and more.

@cougargrades/web

  • [a286e70] Removed Moment.js as a dependency due to bloat
  • [1a71d0b] Added an Instructor button on the homepage
  • [9177321] Removed some demonstrational prefilled areas on the Courses page
  • [25f018a] Fixed a performance issue where instructor courses and section data weren’t fetched asynchronously

@cougargrades/importer

  • [5c4995e] Fixed an issue where the instructor’s departments field was incomplete and only represented one department. This fix requires a database upgrade to be reflected on the site. To prevent downtime during add/drop season, this fix will be processed after January 21, 2020.

🎉 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

📦 New data: Instructor indexing of names

As a result of some updates being written to make searching for instructors by name possible, a database upgrade will be necessary.

This means that some functionality on the site will be limited for a couple hours starting Thursday, January 9, 2020 at midnight. Services will resume automatically when this upload has completed.

Technical mumbo

The updates being made are inspired by Ken Tan’s technique for text search in Google Firestore. After deleting Firestore collections used in production and uploading a new dataset created with the importer tool, future features to the site can be deployed and tested in-place without any delay.

🔭 Future update: Instructor search and Groups

The next planned features for CougarGrades include the “Instructors” page and another feature (temporarily) named “Groups”. These are the pages that have been greyed out and marked with a “🔒” in the navigation bar at the top of the site.

In order for these features to work as intended, certain statistics will need to be computed for the entire grades database before work can begun on the interface itself. Those statistics have been periodically worked on and are reaching completition. The goal is to have the Instructors feature available by the start of the Spring 2020 semester, which will be Monday, January 13, 2020, and the “Groups” feature completed at a later date because the current planned design is more elaborate to develop than previous areas of the site.

Site growth

Since the launch of CougarGrades in September 2019 until today, the website has received over 2800 unique visitors through organic growth. This includes positive reception on the subreddit /r/UniversityOfHouston. I am blown away with the positive feedback and I’m thankful that the UH community finds CougarGrades useful. 😄