Looking for an easy elective? Try HSCI 181. Course Diggers, a website designed by SFU students, says that 24.5 per cent of the grades for this class are in the ‘A’ range. Students rate the difficulty and workload as 1.0 on a five-point scale.
Course Diggers is a website designed and developed by SFU business students Ryan Tavakol and Preetpal Sohal. The pair met in a project management class last Spring, where they first developed the idea for the site.
The website takes data that SFU releases on the grade distribution for various classes and aggregates that data into easy-to-read graphs. It also has a user input feature where students can rate difficulty and workload of courses and also add comments. After launch, a ranking feature was added to rank courses based on how much of a “GPA booster” they were.
The website might appear similar to another popular site, Rate My Prof, where students can submit reviews for professors. Said Tavakol, “In a way it is [like Rate My Prof], but we’re not competing at all. It’s a complement. You use Rate My Prof once you know which course you want to take. [. . .] But before you decide on the course, the idea is, you use Course Diggers.”
Tavakol’s own experience registering for classes was an inspiration for the initiative: “I was using SFU’s published grade distribution data in the past and that was [. . .] super messy, but I found it super useful because I could see for example what percentage of A’s and B’s certain classes had.”
The two estimate they spent over 100 hours working on the website, with Sohal handling back-end coding and Tavakol doing HTML coding and layout tasks on the front-end. The website launched in its beta stage on July 11. They began to advertise their project by putting up posters and doing in-class presentations to get the word out.
While the project has gone far beyond the walls of a classroom and the pair are paying out-of-pocket for server costs, they have no plans to turn a profit in the near future. Said Sohal, “The main thing is helping people. [. . .] People are finding it useful and we’re keeping it online.”
Student feedback has been positive, says Tavakol. “Overall the feedback has been really great. [. . .] One person online told us that the site gave him, so far, two solid A’s.” The site, thus far, has received over 250 reviews for SFU courses, 4,050 grade distributions, and has seen usage by over 6,000 individuals since its launch in July.
Currently, Course Diggers is primarily tailored to SFU, with some information available for UBC as well. However, Sohal mentioned that UBC’s data is much harder to aggregate. In addition, the user base for UBC is small, which they suspect is due to the fact they have not advertised there yet.
Tavakol expressed that faculty and administration support for the project has been helpful.
Associate Dean at the Beedie School of Business, Andrew Gemino, met with Tavakol and expressed interest in referring him to marketing professors who could help reach more students.
“They were giving me ideas of ‘how could you reach more students,’ ‘how could you improve the site’,” said Tavakol. “What I really like about Beedie in general, is they’re very supportive of student initiatives and projects.”
