Visualizing UW's exam schedule by faculty
So my exam schedule is unfavourable. I have exactly two exams during the exam period: one on the first day and one on the last day. Great.
"Man, I always have an exam on the second-last or last day." I thought to myself. "I wonder if science consistently gets screwed over with a disproportionate number of late exams."
There was only one thing to do. I used the source data to make a graph. And actually, the distribution seems fairly even.
For the time being, you can also find a PDF version here.
I had to make some approximations in creating these graphs. First of all, this graph does not include BUS courses, since the PDF released by the Registrar's office didn't include that data. I counted AFM under Arts (IIRC the Arts contingent of Accounting Finance Management is much larger than Math or Science), and I counted Software Engineering as...well, engineering.
Our school is nerdtacular, so some of you might be interested in how I made these. I converted the Registrar's office into a plaintext file. Then I wrote a couple of perl scripts: one to parse the data and spit out the totals, and another to take that data and spit out an eps file containing pretty pies. Explanatory text and finishing touches were added using Inkscape.
I've thought of a few ways the graph could be expanded:
- Make another graph, showing a breakdown of courses by year. Are all first year exams on the first day? Are fourth year exams more spaced out? Are there any trends at all? I'm curious, and I could plot this with only a few modifications to my code.
- Plot by student rather than by exam. The graph I made is just for exams. It doesn't distinguish between exams written by 10 students versus 100 students. But I would be able to write another script or two that could scrape that information out of the Schedule of Classes. That might be interesting.
- Make it interactive. If I really had free time, I would have done this in Flash or somesuch. When you hover over a pie slice with your mouse, the graph tells you what exams happen at that time. It'd be awesome, but more work than I'm willing to do with no clear benefit.
Anyway, after having gone to all the effort to make the graph, I thought I'd post it. Maybe someone else will find it interesting. Also, I think we should all have a moment of silence for CS 370, the only class to have an exam during the final time slot of the last day.
I've used blue for science and yellow for arts. These are the colours UW uses to represent those faculties in the bookstore, the colours they use during convocation, and (approximately) the colours UW has chosen for marketing. But it's backwards in my head, because during my frosh week all the science kids had yellow bracelets and the arts students had blue. Because the first thing I saw (the frosh bracelets) were wrong, the wrong colours are forever lodged in my head. See, FOC, you need to pay attention to details like that.
And yes, I called it frosh week.
Edit: The scale in the legend is wrong. Math fail, Ugh. I'm working on fixing it...
Edit 2: The scale in the legend has been corrected. Also, I fixed some grammar errors. I think I have the dumb today.
Edit 3: As per the suggestion below, I have also provided a PDF using UW's actual official faculty colours, which are listed here. However, I'm keeping the PDF with the colours I originally chose online as well - I think UW's colours are ugly in this chart. AHS and Science look too similar, the Math pink is too hot, and Environment deserves a better shade of green.