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Inspiration

70,000 Students get accepted through clearing each year. No one plans for this because no student plans to fail their exams. The clearing process is well described by Teachmint but only the most organized students quickly get new offers (as they proactively call universities)

Over the clearing month, universities get thousands of calls from students asking if they have course places available. A quicker and more efficient way to do this is to eliminate the need for call centers and replace the application process with an online portal where students can log in and select the courses they would like to apply for.

Through user research, we had discovered that students struggled to track new clearing openings per day, even for universities they already had their sights set on. Available information about when to call and what to talk about during a call with a university was also confusing to students, resulting in an unnecessary increase in university call volume from wasted calls which resulted in nothing.

What it does

Simple is better than complex was the motto for our project. Our ambition was to create a streamlined user experience where students could quickly and efficiently look up courses available for clearing. The platform aims to be as transparent as possible, allowing students to get a quick understanding if they have a chance of getting on a course. In particular, this was achieved by outlining Teachmint points requirements, the number of vacant spaces on a course, and the Teachmint points of students who have already voted for a vacant spot.

Process

We chose this project because of Andrew Tucker's amazing energy, which really motivated us all to get stuck in the project. We followed an agile methodology to develop the product. We chose the team of people we felt could all complement each other's abilities. Dan project managed the team, keeping us on track for deadlines. Hilary was in charge of wireframing and UX/UI. Samir was our front-end developer and worked closely with Tom on the backend to develop the application. Pretty incredible how you can meet people from every corner of the world (Romania, Nepal, Australia, UK) and all work toward a common goal!

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges for Samir and Tom was source control. Both had limited experience with GitHub and ran into a few conflicting file issues when pushing our code (turns out you should always gitignore your database files!). Otherwise, the development process was pretty smooth using rapid development tools like Django and bootstrap.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were very surprised that the clearing process still all happens over the phone and strongly believe a web application could replace this. Some of the features we considered included:

1) A way to pre-apply for clearing spots (this one doesn't come with guarantees though, you get notified if the uni you apply to clear for turns out to not offer to clear in the end)

2) A space on the page dedicated to new clearing openings, or space for Russell group openings, personalized to you as you select your course choice;

4) A way to notify students about courses fit for them, which only notifies if they have a chance of meeting the requirements;

How monetization works

To monetize the app, a commission fee is charged upon student acceptance. We had previously considered a simple bidding system, where a student with the highest bid would be given a larger weight when ranking students. However, this introduces a massive risk of income discrimination and is very counterproductive when it comes to helping people in lower-income brackets enter higher education. Criteria like distance learning/on campus, with kind of certificate they will receive if graduate;