This was a program I threw together during an all nighter that I pulled my freshman year. Essentially, every semester, we need to pick a list of classes that we want to take for the upcoming semester. Since each class has 2-3 professors to choose from sometimes, and each professor has 2-3 times, the list of schedules you can choose from quickly becomes over 30. Being a programmer, I had to obviously come up with a long-winded solution to this simple problem. Rather than picking the classes directly, I wrote this program to calculate every possible schedule I can choose and even check to see whether the class is open.
A few days ago, I pulled another all nighter and added a few more features to the app, such as giving rate-my-teacher.com points for each professor and calculating the average rating for each schedule.
Features
- Automatic Co-Requisite/Pre-requisite calculating
- Only show open classes
- Rate-my-teacher points for each schedule and professor
Not-so-kosher algorithm
Yeah, so I did some sketchy things to log into iSIS and scrape a list of all the classes, so I can’t share the source code. However, feel free to distribute it to your local drug-dealer or UMass Student.
Instructions
- Run the program
- Enter your UMass Lowell email and password
- Press “OK” if it says something. It’s gonna download a list of all the classes from iSIS (sketchy background stuff)
- Go get some coffee and wait until bottom left corner says “Done Saving List”
- Click on “Schedule Maker” tab
- Get a list of classes you want to add from your advisor (I am doing a double major in EE and CS, so I found mine here)
- Start typing the name of your class on top textbox (like “16.311” or “Electronics I Lab”)
- Press “Add Course”
- Rinse and repeat step 7 and 8 for all your classes
- Press “Finish”
- Go get more coffee, this will take a while. It is checking if classes are open, and downloading professor ratings.
- Pick the schedule with highest overall rating, or whatever you like…
- Goodluck being lazy!
Thanks
- Felipe Nascimento – I couldn’t install my own app in these computer labs, so countless number of installs and uninstalls were done by Felipe.
- UMass – for making iSIS so scrapeable
- MTV – for making Rate-my-professor
Best,
Rohit