Struggles and Solutions for University Transfer in California

I still remember how difficult it was when I tried to search for the courses that were transferable to university. I had to go to different websites, talked to school counsellors, and planned my courses well to achieve the required GPA. If there were a platform that could gather all these tasks and information at one place, that would help my first-year course search journey a lot. So here is the platform I have been building for my friend Brian who initiated this idea  – A centralized platform provides online course information of California community colleges, and GPA calculators to track course progress in transferring to university. Now it’s on here.

Fall 2018 Courses of Santa Monica College

There is a lot of useful information gathered here: Course Name, CRN, Credit, Schedule, etc. We are also adding more course details such as current capacity status and course rating retrieved from Rate My Professors, a popular site that has reviews of teachers, schools, and courses.

Currently in our database we have information of 65k+ courses for Summer and Fall 2018. It’s impossible to find the specific course in this large pool. Thus, we need filters for narrowing the scope. We provide a lot of useful filters such as system, subject, and school, and even also start date and start time. For example, I want to find a Computer Science course from Santa Monica College that teaches Java andhas classes on Tuesday in Fall 2018. Here is the result:

Example of Searching for a Specific Course

GPA Calculator

Another focus of the platform is the GPA Calculator. A lot of students, including me in the past, do not know how the GPA calculation works. The planning of achieving the GPA is tedious and difficult, and we need a place to record it. Don’t worry. We also provide it here. We have three types of calculator — GPA, Final Grade, and GPA Raise. Students can save their work on these calculators and come back later to continue as they progress.

GPA Calculator

GPA Calculator measures your average based on the number of credits and grade. The selection of university or community college allows the change of grade selection, because a lot of community colleges do not have plus or minus grade. Of course simply choosing university and not picking those grades still work the same too.

Final Grade Calculator

Final Grade Calculator provides the final grade needed according to the final weight and current score. It is useful to have a sense that how much a student needs to achieve in the final, to help balance out the effort spent on different courses. For the example above, a student can focus more on MATH 102 instead in the final, as it needs at least 65% to pass, while CHEM 120 only needs 26.7%.

GPA Raise Calculator

GPA Raise Calculator determines the score or number of credits needed in order to achieve a specific GPA. The two examples show the usage of this projection tool.

Forum

There can be some specific school or course related questions that is hard to get the answer. Setting up with counsellors in multiple colleges can take a lot of time. Here we provide a forum that allows creating topics and comments. Students can asking questions like school registration process and the course difficulty.

College-based Forum

Topics of Santa Monica College

Discussion of a Topic

The whole platform is built in Laravel and VueJS with Material Design.

This is still an on-going project — still have many ideas to be implemented. Give us some comments on how to improve this platform! Please give us any comments on how to improve this to help students better!

Originally published at Medium.com on July 10, 2018.