canigraduate.uchicago.edu

Terminology

Courses and scheduling

• department is a substring of course identifiers that represents the host department, for example, MATH.
• id is a fully-qualified course identifier that includes a department, for example, MATH 15100.
• period is a name of a course offering period, for example, Winter.
• term is a fully-qualified course offering period, for example, Winter 2016. Note that these are not referred to as semesters or quarters to avoid dependence on any temporal regularity. There is no guarantee that a university stays on a semester or quarter system.
• course is an individual course offering. A course is uniquely identified by its id and its term, for example, MATH 15100 offered in Autumn 2015. Note that we explicitly choose to use course instead of class to avoid reserved word conflicts. Additionally, note that in some cases, a Course object may refer to a term-invariant course. This is done for convenience, as naming the object Id is less desirable.
• section is an identifier that represents the specific course selection within a quarter. This permits multiple sections of courses to be offered each term, for example, MATH 15100 section 01 offered in Autumn 2015. Typically, different sections have different schedules, however this is not required.
• activity is an individual course attendance block, for example, Lecture or Discussion.
  • primary is a type of activity for which attendance to all primaries is required, for example, Lecture.
  • secondary is a type of activity for which attendance to only one secondary is selected, for example, Lab.
• crosslist is a list of ids that are equivalent.

Grades and transcripts

• quality is whether or not the course counts towards the student's calculated gpa.

Data specifications

Institutions must meet certain requirements in order to be represented on Can I Graduate?. These requirements are listed below.

Course identifiers

In order to use wildcard matching, course identifiers must have an ordinal representation. Otherwise, only exact matching is possible.

Departments

Departments must have one unique identifier.

Crosslistings

Course crosslistings must be valid equivalence classes. Missing or incomplete crosslisting information can produce unexpected behavior.

Data schema

Schedule listings

Schedules are stored in an object at /schedules/<course id>/<year>/<period> (e.g. https://canigraduate-43286.firebaseio.com/schedules/PHYS%2013200/2007/Winter.json) that looks like the following

{  
   "XX":{  # Section ID.
      "department":"PHYS",
      "enrollment":[86, null], # null is used to represent unknown or no value. If the total is 0, then it represents consent required.
      "primaries":[  # Primaries do not have identifiers as all of them are required. 
         {  
            "instructors":[  
               "Nagel Sidney R"
            ],
            "location":"KPTC-106",
            "schedule":[  # A list of tuples representing time ranges of minutes from midnight, Sunday.
               [  
                  2010,
                  2060
               ],
               [  
                  4890,
                  4940
               ],
               [  
                  7770,
                  7820
               ]
            ],
            "type":"Lecture"
         },
         {  
            "location":"KPTC-ARR",
            "schedule":[  
               [  
                  4020,
                  4070
               ]
            ],
            "type":"Discussion"
         }
      ],
      "secondaries":{  
         "01":{ # Secondary activity ID. 
            "enrollment":[  
               "17",
               "CONSENT REQUIRED"
            ],
            "instructors":[  
               "Nagel Sidney R"
            ],
            "location":"KPTC-ARR",
            "schedule":[  
               [  
                  3690,
                  3920
               ]
            ],
            "type":"Lab"
         },
         ...
      }
   }
}