Pull more information from CAPE results?

[niemasd]

Where do the data come from? Is there any way to integrate more information about instructors than a relative ranking, as well as more data about the course than time commitment and an expected grade? For example, looking up some CAPE results, the data in the "Full Details" section of a given CAPE result is quite information-rich

I'm not sure how you're pulling the data, they seem to let you search by department without a name or course number, so one could probably do something like the following:

• For each department d (via ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$ddlDepartments):
  • Select d and perform the search
  • For each CAPE result r:
    • Pull the raw HTML for the web page of r
    • Parse all the information in the "Full Details" section (e.g. by having a mapping of span IDs to information)

This is an awesome project that I imagine would be very helpful to students! Good luck :-)

[andportnoy]

The notebook together with tools.py shows how the data are pulled. The trick is that each professor's name is stored as <lastname>, <firstname>, so querying for , essentially drops the table.

That's a great idea and I've looked at that info before. Unfortunately these "full details" pages use several different formats and the data available also vary. But it definitely could be interesting to pick something in the intersection and implement a richer comparison.

[andportnoy]

@niemasd By the way, how did you find out about Smarter Capes? Thanks for leaving your feedback!

[niemasd]

It was shared on /r/ucsd!