Do you have any clue what classes you’re going to take next year?
Most bachelor’s degrees require around 120 credit hours to graduate. For a college like UTD, that means picking roughly 40 classes from the hundreds offered, fulfilling different requirements that can change based on school and major. All these options create a headache for any Comet who goes in unprepared.
Naturally, a number of tools have emerged to mitigate the difficulty of planning out future semesters, with UTD students primarily using four of them: Rate My Professors, UTD Grades, UTD Trends and SAGE.
A brief overview
Rate My Professors, or RMP, allows anyone to anonymously post reviews of professors at any institution in the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom by rating them on a five-star scale.
UTD Trends was created by Nebula Labs, a student organization at UTD, and allows students to view grade distributions for classes, but not individual sections. It also has AI-generated summaries of professors’ RMP reviews alongside a built-in scheduling tool.
UTD Grades is a tool created by the UTD chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery. It also allows students to look at the grade distribution of any previously offered class at UTD.
SAGE was also created by ACM and has two primary functions: an adviser chatbot that has access to information from various websites and a scheduler that can look at what classes have already been taken and suggest courses that will fulfill remaining degree requirements.
The details
RMP was created in 2001 and has been a big name for quite a while, but this longevity has not necessarily brought credibility along with it. In an article in the journal Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, researchers found that the easier a class was, the higher a rating a professor would get on RMP. This certainly doesn’t invalidate all reviews left on the site, but it does add some additional perspective.
But any analysis of UTD Grades is incomplete without discussion of its counterpart, UTD Trends. Both programs display RMP scores and grade distributions for classes, but even that basic idea present in both tools is approached from different angles.
“If you want to look at each individual section, which a lot of people do, you can look at UTD Grades. If you want to look at one … professor, one course, and see the grade distribution for everything, you can look at Trends,” Tyler Hill, current Nebula president, said.
UTD Grades lets students view assorted information alongside the grades, like the professor’s RMP score if they have one. While the program certainly has scheduling utility, that’s not always what it’s used for, according to Luke Sultzer, head of the team at ACM responsible for Grades.
“Right now I do not believe [registration is] the main use case … that many people use UTD Grades for,” Sultzer said. “It’s mainly, like, someone [has] a class they know of and they just want to see how their professor does or [check] the grade of the whole class last semester.”
In addition, UTD Grades has experienced relatively little active development in the recent past for fear of cluttering up the already efficient product, according to Sultzer. This contrasts with Nebula’s willingness to add new features to UTD Trends, such as the schedule planner incorporated in the website.
The final and most recently developed tool among these four is SAGE. One of its main functions is a chatbot that, according to SAGE development lead Alen Jo, exists so individual students can ask questions naturally and easily get the information they were looking for without digging themselves.
The other main function of SAGE is a planner, where students can import their transcripts and see recommended classes for their next semesters, or even the rest of their degree. This feature in particular is what sets it apart from the other tools already present in this saturated field.
“With tools like Rate My Professor, you get things related to professors. And UTD Grades … that’s more for just looking at grade distributions across [classes]. But the core thing with our solution is that we want students to be able to know what classes to take next semester, the semester after that to … graduate on time,” Jo said.
SAGE itself just recently had a 2.0 release, and the teams behind both UTD Grades and Trends are looking to improve the services they offer in the coming year with further development. As good as these tools are now, they are likely to get even better.
