jpinkney / major-finder

A tool for finding your major at UofT

Major Finder

A tool for finding your major at UofT

Takes your first year courses and tells you what Specialist, Major or Minor program(s) you are eligible for

Currently drawing data from the 2016-2017 Arts and Science Calendar

License Information

Major Finder is open source and released under the MIT License

To Do List

• Filtering (i.e. if a user did not take any math courses there is no point searching through programs that require math)
• Better feedback for user
• Add UTM/UTSC version
• Input validation ("Error, not a valid course code")
• Links to the calendar page of posts a user is eligible for (Patrick currently working on)
  • Can be done by adding links to majors.json and adapting the output in javascript to display the postName as a link

Data Structure

The application relies on a compiled list of St.George Campus Arts and Science subject POSTs and their requirements. This list is in the following format:

[
  {
    "name":"Computer Science Major / Specialist / Minor",
    "requirements:":[
      "CSC148",
      "CSC165",
      "MAT135",
      "MAT136"
    ]
  },
  {
    "name":"Computer Science Major / Specialist / Minor",
    "requirements:":[
      "CSC148",
      "CSC165",
      "MAT137"
    ]
  }
]

This data structure visualized (from json 2 html):

Some programs can have different courses that allow entry (i.e. MAT135/136 vs. MAT137), so the same POST may result from different first year courses. The list of programs and requirements reflects this

Programs not included in the application (for now) due to complicated requirements:

• Any program without specific first year requirements
• Geoscience Major/Minor
• Earth and Environmental Systems Major
• Ethics, Society and Law Major (Based on breadth reqs.)
• International Relations Specialist (Only some variants of the reqs.)
• Forest Conservation Science Specialist/Major/Minor
• Forest Conservation Specialist/Major/Minor
• Environmental Geography Specialist/Major ("Pick any two courses")
• Human Geography Specialist/Major/Minor ("Pick any two courses")
• Physical and Environmental Geography Specialist/Major/Minor
• Geographic Information Systems Minor
• Urban Studies Specialist/Major/Minor (Pick selections of different courses)
• Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations Specialist/Major/Minor (Many many different combos)
• Peace, Conflict and Justice Specialist/Major (Type 3 with many many requirements)
• Physiology Major/Minor ("Pick any of the following")

Program Design

• Takes sanitized input of first year courses from a user, and organizes them into an array

  • For example, a user may enter: MAT137Y, CSC148H, csc165h, ita100
  • The application will interpret this as:

    ["MAT137", "CSC148", "CSC165", "ITA100"]
    

• Passing this data into our algorithm, we compare the user's input with data from the list of programs

• If a programs "requirements" are entirely contained in the input, that program's "name" is added to the list of programs returned to the user when the program terminates

• Repeat the previous step until the list of programs has been exhausted

• Display the list of programs that the user qualifies for

• For our example above, this list would be:

  Computer Science Specialist/Major/Minor
  
  Italian Specialist/Major/Minor
  
  European Studies Major (Italian)
  
  Statistics Specialist/Major/Minor
  
  Applied Statistics Specialist