pdf-parser

Machine-readable grade distributions are Good Bull. If you wind up using this data or code in some form, credit would be appreciated. Just add your name to using.md.

What is it?

This is a simple script designed to:

1. Download TAMU grade distribution PDFs from previous years (they have removed PDFs from before 2014) (using requests)
2. Extract the data in those PDFs (using PyPDF2)
3. Convert that data into CSV format and save it for use in your ML/stats project, scheduling app, or whatever you might need it for.

How do I use it?

If you'd like to use the data, there will be a ZIP file published as a release automatically every month that contains all of the scraped CSV data.

If you want the PDFs or CSVS individually, just run (with Python 3 installed)

1. Create a new virtual environment (I use python3 -m venv env on Ubuntu 18.04) and activate it (source env/bin/activate)
2. Install the dependencies (pip install -r requirements.txt)
3. python main.py

Why'd you make it?

Texas A&M University likes to publish their grade distributions publicly for record-keeping. The university does not provide access to machine-readable versions of these files without a department head signature and special permission. I don't want to get either of those things.

How do I help?

Pull requests of all kinds are welcome! Some issues I'm trying to tackle:

• Automating releases to be every 3 months or so using GitHub Actions.
• Refactoring/cleaning up code
• Including data from before 2014 (Marcus Salinas has 2012-2014, but I can't find anything from before 2012).
• Refining data collection
  • Using instructor's real names, rather than "LAST, F."