

Ask HN: Review my side project - UniversityReport - ig1

I've been working on it in my spare time for the last few months and it would be good to get some feedback before I unleash it on real users: http://www.universityreport.co.uk
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rossj
It took me longer than it should have to find the course I am interested in
within the cloud of courses, maybe there's an easier way of doing this?

Another problem is that if I pick a course and then have to pick a University
it is going to be a long time before I find one with the UCAS score I want, or
a certain drop-out rate so I wonder whether a table based view of the
universities (once I've chosen a course) might allow me to sort by the fields
I am interested in and _then_ click on the interesting University.

Great idea though :)

~~~
nicko
I'll second the need to rank Universities based upon a course. As a non UK
resident I have only heard of a handful of the universities. I'm sure there
are some lesser known Universities with great departments, try not to make me
click on every university to find them...

After some further investigation I see you've implemented a decent attempt at
solving this problem with the 'similar universities' table (However there is a
built in assumption that i can find a university at my academic level. Also as
an aside, check your algorithm, Oxford Computer Science is similar to
Cambridge CS but not vice versa).

The analytical side of me would still strongly prefer all universities for the
selected course ranked in a table, especially if I can reorder the table by
metrics as rossj suggests.

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conorgil145
I think that the more information people have while making decisions the
better, so I love the idea. However, I could not find an about page on the
site and I have a few questions.

1) Why one would want to use your site instead of other sources that are
already available? For example, US News and World Report
([http://www.usnews.com/sections/education/worlds-best-
univers...](http://www.usnews.com/sections/education/worlds-best-
universities/index.html)) or Princeton Review in the states
(<http://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings.aspx>) have a lot of
information about universities.

2) Where do you collect your data from and why should one trust it?

\- Are students interviewed or polled somehow?

\- Do the Universities cooperate and provide access to their databases or
provide the data in some other form?

\- Is there a method for students to provide feedback directly and if so how
can you verify their enrollment at the university they claim to attend?

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ig1
Clickable: <http://www.universityreport.co.uk>

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binarymax
I'll be honest I'm not really into the colour scheme (too much grey), and the
list of courses is a bit too messy for my taste. On the other hand, the
information provided is excellent!

