Enhancement: Course Requirements

[Eurphus]

Hello!

I started building a project for tracking my classes and planning out how everything works with my degree and specializations, but I realized the pre/anti/co-requisite tracking does not exist in a good form (Removed since V2). The strings provided require string parsing to get the courses in any usable format, this wouldn't be that bad but it seems like every faculty does it differently and barely any consistency even between subjects is upheld.

I was interested in seeing if this something that could be added as an enhancement, or if others have found a way around this.

[sbobkin]

Hi @Eurphus,

Let me try to answer the questions in your issue.

Q: The parsed requisite data
A: Yes, this data was broken down in V2. The logic there relied on string parsing and frankly had errors. This is the reason we did not attempt to implement it as is in V3.

Q: Inconsistency between faculties
A: Yes, this data doesn't exist in a well defined data format at all. At any point, depending on the student and faculty, a different academic calendar and requirements could apply. Ultimately, this is a fairly manual process today.

Q: What does it mean for the future?
A: There has been a project where the course calendars are now handled in a different system. I think there is a better process, or at least an "official" process there that the requirements are broken up as data elements. It's on my long term to-do list to try to use that data. I believe it's supposed to make it back into Quest at some point, which is an endpoint we have easier access to, but if that doesn't happen; then we'll try to get it out of the new system and then hopefully make it available here. To set expectations, there is no timeline for this effort.

[Samuel-Martineau]

Hi @sbobkin,

I am confused by something: Quest can successfully check for course prerequisites being satisfied, so surely it already has access to some form of structured data, no?

[sbobkin]

@Samuel-Martineau

The shortest answer; it's very complicated.

There are some requirements that describe what courses can be or cannot be taken with others, what order, and similar. This is coded in Quest, and is enforced in the course selection process through Quest. It's a series of rules, that don't have a good matching description. At one point in time, I believe we were also told that these rules don't entirely match what the academic calendars state, and were more loose.

On top of this are complications that there are other requirements that dictate what courses you need to achieve a degree. Commonly this is referred to as degree audit. This, as far as I'm aware, does not exist in data form. There are many groups and faculties that have attempted to accomplish this to some level and varied success. We don't have access to any of this data, and because the groups tried to solve the problem for themselves I don't think this requirement data would be comprehensive across Waterloo's offerings.

There is another system outside of Quest that's being treated as the authoritative source for requirement and course catalog data. I was going to attempt some progress on getting info out of it, and seeing what can be done. However, at this point in time the Open Data "initiative" doesn't have a true owner, high level buy in, or assigned resources to make progress past me doing it in "spare" work time. There is no governance that encourages data owners to open data up, and this has further complications with the "budget" issues and more.

I want to say that's all the issues, but it's not. So, I hope I've given you some idea of just how much of a multi faceted problem requirements data is.

[sbobkin]

Leaving a note here, we provide the requirements description field again with no parsing. I'll reinforce that Quest is no longer the system of record for this data, but should usually be correct.