UstCoursePlanner

Course planner for HKUST to automatically handle major, minor, extended major and universal graduation requirements.

Roadmap:

• Scrape and parse all HKUST courses in the 2021-2022 term (plus 3711H) (Done!)
• Build language for creating major requirements (not done)
• Create major requirements (ongoing effort)
• Build the actual web app (in progress)

Special Thanks

Special thanks to some of my peers https://github.com/151044 and https://github.com/TheHakkaman for helping scrape some of the course data and digging out some weird formatting that I eventually parsed.

I want to use the course data!

Please do! I don't want you to go through the pain of parsing their horribly inconsistent formatting :P. This entire repo is licensed under the GPL v3 license, so use the data however you wish within the guidelines of the license. The data is in data/courses.json.

Each course is stored in the following JSON format (take COMP2711 as an example):

"COMP 2711": {
    "attrs": [
        "Common Core (QR) for 4Y programs"
    ],
    "preReqs": ...,
    "coReqs": ...,
    "excls": [
        "COMP 2711H",
        "MATH 2343"
    ],
    "description": "Basic concepts in discrete mathematics needed for the study of computer science: enumeration techniques, basic number theory, logic and proofs, recursion and recurrences, probability theory and graph theory. The approach of this course is specifically computer science application oriented.",
    "dept": "COMP",
    "code": "2711",
    "title": "Discrete Mathematical Tools for Computer Science",
    "credits": 4,
    "coReqIfNoPrereq": true,
    "ccType": "QR",
    "isSsc": false
}

Explanation of some paramaters

• coReqIfNoPrereq is a special parameter for courses where a student will need the co-requisite courses if and only if they do not have the pre-requiisite courses.
• Some courses will have the property handleReqsManually set to true. These are courses that have school/major-sepcific requirements that are too complicated to parse and handle in code. If you use this data, please take care to handle those special cases manually. There are only a few such courses and are listed under data/specialCases.

Explanation of how preReqs and coReqs are stored

The pre-requisites and co-requisites are stored as an expression tree. For example, consider the following pre-requisites for COMP 3711H:

(Grade B+ or above in COMP 2011 / COMP 2012 / COMP 2012H) AND (grade A- or above in COMP 2711 / COMP 2711H / MATH 2343)

This has been parsed and stored in an expression tree like this:

... where / is an OR operator and & is an AND operator.

The value of preReqs and coReqs is the root node of the tree. Each node will have the two properties:

{
    "value": "something",
    "children": [ ... ],
}

where value is what is stored in the node, and children are the connected nodes below the current node.