UGAKey News

Happy New Year!  We are trying to start the New Year off right by rolling out some new changes!

Today we’ve upgraded UGAKey.com to what we are calling version 2.5 (see the announcement post for version 2.0 and other upgrades).

This upgrade provides more helpful information for students, while optimizing your viewing experience.

First things first.  We’ve added links to the UGA Bulletin’s course descriptions.  Click on Info under “Course Info” and you will see the full course title, a detailed description of the course, any prerequisites, semesters offered, grading system, course objectives, and topical outline.  This is a pretty nifty tool that UGA has recently started offering, and we’re glad to be able to implement it in the grade data.  We hope this will help students make better decisions on their class schedules (the more information the better).  Note, some specialized and old courses do not have course descriptions available.

Second, when you click on a department from a dropdown menu or on the homepage, you’ll notice that the data page is now more compact.  We’ve moved the percentages for individual letter grades on to separate pages for each course.  You can click the ‘More Data’ link on the left side of a course to view detailed course grade data.  We’ve made this change to allow the data pages to load quicker on your screen.  This change will also allow us to better integrate more features in the future, including a possible course review or professor review capability (something we’re currently working on).

Lastly, we’ve done a lot of optimizing and cleanup.  Pages should load  faster than before, which we know is helpful when you are registering for that needed course on Drop/Add (got to beat everyone else to OASIS).

If you used the previous version to do detailed filtering of courses by letter grades or other columns, this upgrade limits your abilities.  But, to compensate, we’re keeping the previous version available for you to use, right here.

If you notice any problems with the upgrade or if you have any problems, questions, feedback, or comments, please use our contact form to let us know.  We want to help you, and if something is broken, we can fix it quickly if you let us know.

~Your UGAKey.com Developers

PS- We are waiting to get the Fall 2009 grade data.  We’re hoping to get that in time for Drop/Add.

This morning,  shortly after midnight, we rolled out version 2.0 of UGA Key.  We have been working on it for a while, and are excited to roll it out for everyone.  Go, check it out!

This new version of UGAKey.com uses a newer system to display grade tables, which solves a problem we’ve had for a while (some people had trouble viewing in Safari and Internet Explorer and on slower systems).  It also means that grade tables load much (much!) faster than before.  In fact, I just loaded all English subject classes (almost 3,000 classes worth of data) and the page finished loading within 8 seconds (that’s on a fresh install of Firefox 3.5 RC3).

The new version also includes course syllabi, a frequent request.  Check out the column on the far right when looking at grades – if there is a link in the cell, we have the syllabus in our repository.  We will be adding more syllabi as we move forward.

This version of UGAKey.com contains grades from Fall 1999 through Spring 2009.  That’s ten years worth of grades for you to use when choosing courses!  This also means we have 32,366 classes worth of data!

If you happen to prefer the old version of UGAKey.com, you can find it here.  We can’t guarantee how long it will work and the grades on it only go through 2008, but it is up for the time being.

We would love to hear from UGA students! Do you like the new Key, love it, hate it?  Get in touch with us!  We think we’ve squashed all of the bugs, but if you have any problems or suggestions, please contact us.

To stay up-to-date with the latest on the UGA Key, check UGAKey News or @ugakey on Twitter.

~The UGA Key Developers

We’ve let some people take a look at what we are calling the “Beta Key” and now we want to invite everyone.  We have developed a new frontend for UGA Key that integrates a collection of course syllabi. You can get to the syllabi (if available for that course section) from the far right column.

You can now search for specific professors across all departments, and you can sort data now by clicking the column titles at the top. You can also limit your searches with the drop-down boxes below some of the column titles. To clear all your sorts and limits, hit the X link at the top left of the grade table.

To try out the Beta Key, go to http://beta.ugakey.com.  If you have any problems, get in touch with us and include plenty of details.

We are looking forward to rolling this update out sometime soon!

~UGA Key Developers

Some of you contacted us with news that the grade data on UGAKey was not working with Safari 3.

We seem to have corrected the problem, which had to do with a feature we had been using to debug the site.

The spreadsheets should now be working for Safari users (most Safari users are still using version 2, but those who have Leopard installed have Safari 3).

If any Safari users (or users of any browsers, for that matter) are having problems getting any part of the site to load, please contact us.

Thanks!

UGAKey is now open for business!

After much blood, sweat, and tears, this project is online.

UGA students can now use grade data from Fall 1999 to Spring 2007 to help inform themselves while registering for classes.

For more information on the history of UGA Key, and The Key, please check out the History page.