New website helps students with course registration

As Fall 2023 registration opened for continuing students March 27, one student is harnessing artificial intelligence to streamline the course-searching process. 

Danial Asaria, a junior majoring in computer science and business administration, is the mind behind Trojan Courses (trojancourses.com), a website that aims to help students find classes by searching via the content of the courses rather than exact keywords. Asaria said he launched the website because, while USC has numerous interesting classes, it may be challenging for students who want to explore new fields to find them.

“The upfront work to manually sift through and find classes that you really want … causes people to give up completely and stay within the bounds of whatever their major is,” Asaria said.

On the front end, users enter what they wish to learn and then the website returns a list of classes and their descriptions. Upon clicking the link for the class they’re interested in, users are redirected to USC’s Schedule of Classes for the specific course, where students can get more relevant information.

Trojan Courses, launched Tuesday, uses AI-powered semantic search, which looks at the intent or meaning behind the user’s search rather than matching keywords. The website relies on a vector database, which turns words into numbers and then compares these numbers to determine close matches on which to base its results. The website has access to all courses for Fall 2023 through USC’s Schedule of Classes Application Programming Interface

As of the time of publication, the website had 1,349 unique visitors and 2,596 page views. Jacqueline Guo, a freshman majoring in computer engineering and computer science, and a user of Trojan Courses, said the website is convenient to find classes.

“In order to find a class, you typically find it through the specific name of the class or by the course number,” Guo said. “Especially if you’re looking for a fun class … this is probably a better way to search for those directly.”

Sunny Singh, a graduate student studying business administration, said he was unfamiliar with USC’s course Catalogue and wasn’t aware of the meaning of each abbreviation — making it especially time-consuming for him to find the specific entrepreneurship and finance classes he was looking for. Trojan Courses helped him solve this issue.

While the website is innovative and relatively easy to use, he said, there is scope for further enhancements and more features to help students.

“It would be interesting for me to see when certain classes are offered or if they’re only offered in certain semesters, like Fall or Spring, so that I could do a better job of potentially populating my course selection,” Singh said. 

Asaria said he plans to introduce further updates, such as adding the number of units, matching the class timing with classes the student has already registered for and integrating Google Calendar. Furthermore, he proposed personalizing the classes suggested by the website based on the track the student is interested in or their major.

“Some classes are annoying … you have to have certain requirements to take them or be in a certain major,” Asaria said. “Maybe you can personalize it more. This is my major, these are the classes … and then that filters out through the classes that only apply to me.”

Asaria said integrating Trojan Courses into Web Registration, which is how students search and register for classes, is his end goal.

“I have emailed a few teachers after developing it, asking if I can try to integrate it,” Asaria said. “One of my teachers is really responsive … She said she’ll show it in meetings in a few weeks and maybe that will help, but I haven’t gotten any specific leads yet.”

Although his website is currently only for USC students, Asaria said he hopes it can expand to other schools.

“My code is pretty generalized,” he said. “All I need is their classes and the rest is already done. If I can get their classes in the same format as USC … or I can even turn it into the format I did, then I can definitely expand this to different schools.”