Hi!

If you're here for newer stuff, head on over to Sean's fork of this repo. It's newer, faster, snazzier and has a lot more features as well as executive decisions and bugfixes we've made since Jun 2022 about parsing plans. If you just want the original parsing stuff or want to get started doing this at you own institution, check here.

Setup

parse.py expects certain files in the files/ directory. Download them from our shared Google Drive folder.

• academic_plans_fa12.csv, containing degree plans for every year, major, and college combination since fall 2012 created by college advisors painstakingly cross-referencing major and college requirements to manually design plans for every major, so there are some human errors. These plans are publicly available at plans.ucsd.edu.

  We use this to create degree plans and curriculum for every major to upload to Curricular Analytics.

  If others want to adapt our code for their university, here is a preview of the first two rows to show what we were dealing with.

  Department	Major	College	Course	Units	Course Type	GE/Major Overlap	Start Year	Year Taken	Quarter Taken	Term Taken
  ANTHROPOLO	AN27	SI	ANTH 1	4.0	DEPARTMENT	N	2012	1	1	FA12

  • Major is an ISIS major code.

  • College is a two-letter code for a UCSD college.

    Code	Name
    RE	Revelle
    MU	Muir
    TH	Marshall (formerly Third)
    WA	Warren
    FI	ERC (formerly Fifth)
    SI	Sixth
    SN	Seventh
    DP	Appears in the file, but we're not sure what it is

    Generally speaking, every major has a plan for every college. However, there are exceptions, usually for weird majors that aren't actually 4-year plans (e.g. only Revelle has plans for undeclared "majors").

  • Course is a manually-written description of a course. It's usually the course subject and number, but it can also be a phrase like "CSE Elective" or list alternatives like "MATH 10A/20A." Human error makes parsing this difficult; see parse_course_name for an attempt.

  • Course Type is either COLLEGE or DEPARTMENT. When GE/Major Overlap is Y (a course satisfies both major and college requirements), Course Type can still be either COLLEGE or DEPARTMENT.

    To get a curriculum (the major requirements) from a plan, we only keep courses with a Course Type of DEPARTMENT or a GE/Major Overlap of Y.

    They do not provide a plan with only major requirements. In #14 it seems removing college-specific courses from Marshall (TH)'s degree plan tends to produce the most compatible results for other colleges, so we base curricula off of Marshall.

  • Start Year indicates the year that the plan is for. For example, a student who enrolls at UCSD in fall 2019 should follow the plan with a Start Year of 2019.

  Some but not all degree plans put courses in a summer quarter (with a Term Taken of SUxx) even though they're not supposed to.

• prereqs_fa12.csv, containing every course and their prerequisites for every quarter since fall 2012.

  We use this to add prerequisite and corequisite relationships between courses in the degree plans for Curricular Analytics.

  Here are some sample rows from the CSV file.

  Term Code	Term ID	Course ID	Course Subject Code	Course Number	Prereq Sequence ID	Prereq Course ID	Prereq Subject Code	Prereq Course Number	Prereq Minimum Grade Priority	Prereq Minimum Grade	Allow concurrent registration
  FA12	4550	AIP197	AIP	197
  FA12	4550	ANAR144	ANAR	144	001	ANTH3	ANTH	3	600	P	Y

  Some courses do not have prerequisites, so they will have a single row with empty fields after Course Number.

  For courses with prerequisites, they will have a row for every prerequisite course. Prereq Sequence ID is a natural number, and of the prerequisites with the same Prereq Sequence ID, only one course is needed to satisfy the requirement. One course from each Prereq Sequence ID is required to satisfy the prerequisites for the course.

  It's unclear what Allow concurrent registration really means---only a few courses have it set to Y. Some course pairs, such as CSE 12 and 15L, are supposedly corequisites according to the course catalog, but they are not listed as corequisites in the table.

• isis_major_code_list.xlsx - Major Codes.csv: Open isis_major_code_list.xlsx "Major Codes" and go to File > Download > Comma Separated Values (.csv). This should be the default name it suggests, so you don't have to worry about setting the name.

  The spreadsheet is a modified version of the publicly available list of ISIS major codes.

  We use this to add the major name and CIP major code to the uploaded curriculum on the Curricular Analytics website.

Uploading

To automatically upload CSV files to Curricular Analytics using upload.py, you need to create a copy of .env.example and name it .env, then fill in AUTHENTICITY_TOKEN and CA_SESSION.

• To get CA_SESSION, open inspect element and head to Application > Cookies > https://curricularanalytics.org. Copy the cookie value for _curricularanalytics_session.