For many students, course selection involves piecing together information from multiple websites before making their decisions. Coursify aims to combine these steps.
Amaan Javed, ArtSci ’27, and a team of six Queen’s students have launched Coursify, a new online platform designed to streamline course selection by bringing together grade distributions, student feedback, and academic planning resources into a single website.
In an interview with The Journal, Javed said the website has approximately 170 users. He said Coursify’s main goal is to become “the one-stop-shop” for students to plan and select their courses so that they only need to click enroll in SOLUS, the website where students officially select their courses.
The team plans to combine sources students use to choose courses, including Reddit posts, Rate My Professor comments, and GPA averages from previous years’ grade data. Courisfy relies on student submissions for this GPA information, as users can upload course grade distribution data from SOLUS directly to the website. The platform also includes a guide explaining how to upload past course data.
In the past, other websites have similarly provided databases of past grade distributions for students to view before enrolling. However, Javed explained Coursify seeks to provide an updated version.
“QU Bird Hunter is five years out of date; Coursify is working to replace it and make a new version with a better user experience,” Javed said.”
While grade distributions show how students have performed academically in the past years, at times they may be unavailable or slightly dated depending on student input.
After you pick up your courses, Coursify uses an algorithm to create viable schedules for your mix of classes.
Coursify is only fully available to those with a Queen’s email. While anyone can upload course information, to make a schedule and access all the website tools, students must sign in. It is not linked to any SOLUS or Microsoft accounts.
Javed said that the team hopes to partner with the Queen’s School of Computing. However, Javed said it gets more complex if they were to become affiliated with Queen’s itself as it would take time to build the relationship, adding that the website works well independently. The Coursify team plans to get in contact with orientation groups to spread the word about the website, targeting incoming students.
Tags
Course shopping, Coursify, rate my professors, schedule, SOLUS
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