One week after the release of Phase II registration, the Tech Student Government Association (SGA) announced the beta release of its new GT Degree Roadmap software. The interactive tool allows students to map out their degree pathways with features unseen in previous tools.
Students can drag and drop courses from a list of all offered courses into their planned semesters, input any possible Advanced Placement (AP) credits from high school and save detailed plans.
A key feature of this software is the visualization through course tree maps, which show the sequential flow of all required prerequisites for a course and provide the option to view post-requisites. There is also real-time conflict detection that immediately notifies users of prerequisite conflicts.
Anson Goo, the Executive Committee Chair of the IT Board’s Internal Tools team initiated the development of the tool. He joined as a member of SGA in October 2023 and was appointed team lead the following semester once he proposed the idea for this project and his peers endorsed it.
Active development of this project began in the Fall 2024 semester and continued into the following spring and summer semesters under the leadership of Goo, as well as with the help of other computer science students.
Nicholas Stone, SGA’s Joint Vice President of Information Technology, explained the overarching vision for the project as a software that could “scrape the [course catalog] data and get it for [students] so that everybody can see where their prerequisites are and very easily and intuitively scope out their plan.”
Goo described the software as an extension of the current system of resources students have access to. Rather than replacing tools such as Course Critique and GT Scheduler, GT Degree Roadmap is meant to “…help [students] with the pre-processing part like looking into prerequisites and planning [them] out,” serving as a replacement for Excel spreadsheets that academic departments use to track coursework. Goo made mentions of recent collaborations with Student Life and the Office of Information Technology to enhance its capabilities.
The Technique also discussed the tool with Steven Girardot, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Student Success. Girardot is a Tech alumnus who has held various administrative roles at the Institute, primarily working with undergraduate education and student success initiatives. His current role includes overseeing units such as the Career Center and Academic Success and Advising
When asked about the scope of the project, Girardot stated, “Our students are very innovative and very forward-thinking and very entrepreneurial. So I think that anything our students develop has huge potential to make [an] impact not only at Georgia Tech but beyond Georgia Tech. It’s very important [for students] to take the information from this tool and work closely with their academic advisors … Make sure the advisor contributes to the overall planning of course scheduling and degree planning and in coordination with the other resources that we have at Georgia Tech as well.”
When asked about the future of the software, Girardot said, “As students continue to work on this tool and this resource, other schools will certainly take notice of the potential innovations in this space. So I have a lot of optimism in that.”
Since the beta release, the SGA team has tracked a milestone of 400 users for the platform, a performance metric that Goo states the team uses for measuring the software’s visibility and outreach. The team also constantly checks responses from the feedback form “as a core planning platform” to evaluate and improve the software. As Stone explained, “the purpose of the IT portion of the student government is to take in any student input, and if there’s a solution that we can do, then we will actively work on that. We’re always trying to drive forward new changes that will help the students.”
The first official version of the tool will be released by the end of the upcoming fall break. Its beta release can be found on GT Degree Roadmap where SGA encourages feedback and continues releasing updates to the program, including brand new features that will aim to maintain an intuitive experience for its users.