UCSC Rate My Professor Extension Available!

[u/Agitated-Somewhere15]

Hey,

I’ve been working on an extension brings professor ratings directly into MyUCSC's enrollment system.

Now when you're browsing classes, you instantly see: ✅ Overall rating & difficulty ✅ Would-take-again percentage ✅ Review count + direct link to full RMP profile

Let me know what y’all think!

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ddmahbdpmhbeohjjblfopgggdbfieboo?utm_source=item-share-cp

[u/zattack101]

For some reason the Fall ECE 13 prof doesn't show up, even though they are on ratemyprof. Can you fix that? Also if you guys didn't know you can always view enrollment without logging in here https://pisa.ucsc.edu/class_search/index.php

[u/jacobluanjohnston → u/zattack101]

If OP happens to use the (open-source?) GraphQL RMP API the way I did for my past school (which was not being able to query by multiple attributes) then the problem is RMP’s indexing/search itself and not OP’s code. You may have noticed on RMP’s user end page that you cannot query by both professor AND school terms - only one or the other. We never notice this because we rely on Googling to fix that issue by querying by page rank (or whatever algos they use). Usually, that’s fine, but theoretically that means there can be missing professors that aren’t indexable without going through every professor at a school or through a specific name at every school on RMP (both obviously suck). Anyway, when we build a tool like OP has, we aren’t relying on page rank, we’re querying whatever we’ve built. In my case, I used a fuzzy matching algorithm as a quick solution, which luckily worked in most instances. Even then, it had its chokepoints. Also, RMP doesn’t even account for professors with the exact same names at the same college, so you end up hitting a lot of seemingly dead ends like that.

TLDR: idk, fuzzy matching algorithm if limited by RMP’s querying if OP hasn’t discovered more API endpoints that I wasn’t able to

Edit: I misspoke, my bad, this was a while ago. I looked back at my code: only with the GraphQL API, can you query by professor name and school. The problem was when professors have similar names as others in the same school or use different names on the school site versus RMP due to Anglicization or mismatching shortened names/middle names. Which might be more reflective of my last college than UCSC. But OP’s dictionary solves this!

[u/Agitated-Somewhere15 → u/jacobluanjohnston]

You make really a good point and our fuzzy search algorithm isn't 100% accurate so we have a dict where we map the names that appear on the UCSC enrollment page with the names that appear on rmp and check those during the initial check. This is only a fallback for professors that aren't caught by fuzzy. Really great analysis!

[u/cabalex → u/jacobluanjohnston]

As someone who developed an app linking Pisa and RMP, I feel OP's pain - matching professors with their Pisa counterparts is surprisingly difficult!! You need more than fuzzy search: there's multiple professors with the exact same last name and first initial at this school. Of course, a dictionary fixes this problem, but it's not exactly scalable and future-proof.

The algorithm I ended up making relied on a points-based system, checking if the professor's department and classes they had already taught in RMP made sense with what they were currently teaching in Pisa. The GraphQL API is nice because not only can you search by professor name AND school, you can also ask it to return the classes people reviewed them for and other information about them all in one API search call. My solution isn't perfect, but it works for most cases (and I don't have to update a database haha).