Sunday, July 11, 2010

Scripting Segue

At San Francisco State, all courses transferred and all courses applied to your major are tracked in a DARS report.  It's really powerful and intuitive tool to help you assess your academic standing.  The problem though arises when you have a ton of courses transferred from different institutions, it gets quite messy and time consuming.

I thought that this should be a good solution to practice scripting in Perl, and so I embarked and after about 3 days of on and off coding, I perfected my script.  It takes the DARS report from its web format (HTML), filters, sorts, and outputs the result into a format usable in an Excel spreadsheet.

In the end of the endeavor, I found that the totals in the Unofficial Transcript (another report that actually shows your GPA) was accurate.  But now I know precisely how much effort is needed to nudge up my GPA, and I can toy with projections on a Spreadsheet.

If any other business students do these types of activities, I'll be surprised.  Ultimately though, the gain from all this is that my skills are sharper...

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