Degree planner

ANU computing degree planner

Plan an ANU computing degree semester by semester. Pick your degree and the year you started, add courses to semesters, and after every change the planner shows which degree requirements you’ve met and what’s still missing: “Compulsory courses: 4/8”, “ICT-related courses: 6/12 units — 6 missing”, “1000-level courses: 36 of at most 60 units”. Your plan is saved on the server and belongs to your browser, so it’s still there when you come back.

It covers the seven ANU computing degrees, using the 2027 rules from ANU Programs and Courses: the Bachelor of Advanced Computing (Honours), Bachelor of Computing, Bachelor of Computing (Honours), Graduate Diploma of Computing, Master of Computing, Master of Computing (Advanced) and Master of Machine Learning and Computer Vision, with their majors and specialisations.

What good looks like here

The system this replaces is Programs and Courses plus a spreadsheet: P&C states the rules in prose, and working out whether your own plan satisfies them is left to you, usually the night before enrolment. Good, here, means the planner does that arithmetic correctly and honestly.

Rules are data, transcribed from the source. Each degree, major and specialisation is a JSON file in src/data/, transcribed from its 2027 P&C page and citing that page. On every boot the files are written into SQLite, and the page reads the rules back from the database. Adding a degree means adding a file, not changing code.

One model for every degree. Requirements form a tree of a few kinds: a compulsory list, “N units from this list”, “up to N units from this list”, a pool such as “18 units of 3000- or 4000-level COMP”, a level limit, a choice (specialisation, major or capstone) the student picks, electives and the total. That covers everything P&C states as a checkable rule across all seven degrees.

No double counting. P&C never says a course may count toward two requirements, so each planned course is counted once. Courses are assigned in the order the rules are listed, specific lists before general pools, with electives taking what’s left. Level limits and the total are checks across the whole plan, so they can overlap with everything else.

Never green by accident. What the planner can’t check is labelled “Check yourself”, never marked as met: the Transdisciplinary Problem-Solving tag (P&C doesn’t publish which courses carry it), credit and exemptions, prerequisites, which semester a course runs in, load limits, GPA-based transfers, honours marks and double degrees. Each degree lists its own gaps under “What this planner doesn’t check”. Where a P&C page contradicts itself, the formal requirements block wins and the conflict is recorded in that degree’s file.

Checks that hold it to this. pnpm check runs:

Whether the transcription matches P&C is judgement, not a test: the tests only prove the files are internally consistent. Unit totals that don’t add up have caught transcription mistakes. A wrong course code that still adds up would not be caught.

What I chose not to build: logins (a cookie per browser is enough to keep plans apart), prerequisite and offering checks (P&C holds those on each course’s page, not the program page), and editing rules in the app (the rules come from P&C, not from users).