Planning your course at IITK is cumbersome because of the manual nature of checking all the options, and the uncertainty of whether you will get the courses you plan for.
The IITK Pathway Selector is a Web Tool that facilitates IITK Students in planning their academic programmes by auto checking time table clashes and pre-requisite issues; and providing a clean UI for them to plan out the various pathways they may take.
“Anant, a 2nd-year MTH student who failed 2 compulsory courses, is confused about his next steps. He needs clarity on prerequisites, credit progress, and timetable fit, but the data is scattered and hard to interpret.”
IIT Kanpur offers a highly flexible academic structure that allows students to customize their degrees by choosing courses across departments. While recommended templates guide students, they are free to drop or replace courses — as long as credit and prerequisite requirements are met.
To ensure academic alignment, students must track course types (IC, DC, DE, OE, etc.) and accumulate the required credits. This flexibility enables interdisciplinary paths and minors, but it requires proactive planning to meet graduation and specialization criteria.
The three main challenges students face with course planning at IITK:
While IITK maintains that planning is the student's responsibility, these challenges often result in students making uninformed decisions that they later regret.
My solution to this problem is for the students to be able to map out various possible selections, and corresponding fall-back plans if they don’t get certain courses in an intuitive UI experience with the convenience of auto detection for time clashes and pre-requisite issues. This empowers the students to make wiser decisions and reduce the uncertainty.
At the beginning of each semester, I will scrape the updated data sources to refresh the backend database with the freshest information. After the automated scraping, some manual updates will be done by me for MTH,SDS and CSE branches to ensure these courses have complete information.
The backend database will then be made available to the frontend website, where users will be able to create their templates. They will be able to add courses into their template by searching the backend database, with the timetable clashes and pre-req issue checks built-in. During the time the website is active, the User template will be stored temporarily on backend servers, but on closing of website, that user’s data will be deleted. For data permanence, user will be given the option to export and import their templates.