A tour of QuakerPlan

The workspace

After you pick your degrees, the workspace opens as a row of panels you can open, close and resize. A top bar shows your running totals: credit units planned, credit units required, and how many requirements still have nothing in them.

On a laptop the panels sit side by side. On a phone they become tabs along the bottom of the header, and dialogs open as full-width sheets, so the same plan works in a lecture hall or a dorm room.

Degree panels

Each degree you are pursuing gets its own panel, coloured differently so you can tell at a glance which requirement belongs to which degree. A requirement is a row: its title, how many course units it asks for, and what is filling it right now.

Rows show one of several states: done (a completed course counts), planned (a future course counts), placed but undecided, over the limit, or unfilled. Click a row to see which of your courses are counting toward it and why. Click Choose to see every course that would satisfy it, with ratings and workload next to each.

• Requirements that are a choice between options show as one row with the options listed.
• Caps that Penn states (for example, no more than two 1000-level courses) are enforced by the checklist, not left to your memory.
• If you disagree with how a rule was read, you can add or remove a course from its list and the change is marked as yours.

The four-year grid

Your courses live in semester cards, one per term, laid out as a grid. Drag a course from one semester to another. Dragging a course onto a requirement row pins it there. A pin tells the checker which requirement the course is meant to fill when it could count for several.

Courses you are not sure about can be held as placeholders, for example "one Cross-Cultural course", so a requirement is visibly spoken for before you pick the course. Anything not yet placed appears in columns by what it still needs.

Course search

Search by course code, title, department, instructor, or attribute. Results appear as you type and open at once, because the course data is loaded into your browser rather than fetched from a server on every keystroke.

Click a course title and its details unfold in place: description, credit units, attributes, every section with days, times, rooms and instructors, and instructor ratings from past terms. The Work column shows how much work a course has historically been. Ratings and difficulty are shown for you to weigh. Nothing is hidden because a course is hard.

The weekly schedule

Pick a section and it appears on a week grid. Overlapping meetings are flagged, including a lab that clashes even when its lecture does not. When a course has many sections, the planner checks whether any combination avoids every clash before it warns you, so you are only warned about a conflict you cannot fix.

Calendar and exports

Download your schedule as an .ics file, or subscribe to a private calendar link so Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook always shows your current plan. Export the plan as a CSV to keep a copy. Start and end dates follow Penn's academic calendar.

Notes

Every course has a notes field that follows the course across plans: what an advisor said, a professor you want, a prerequisite you are worried about. The assistant reads your notes, so what you write there shapes the advice you get.

An AI assistant that has read your plan

Ask in plain English: which courses satisfy Cross-Cultural, what is a lighter semester, where does this course clash. The assistant sees your degrees, your planned courses, your notes and the course catalog, and can propose changes as cards that you accept or ignore. It never edits your plan on its own. Dictate with the microphone if you would rather talk.

Looks and accounts

Warm light and dark themes, a plain design, no ads. Accounts use an email address and password. Your address is confirmed by an emailed link, and a recovery code is the way back in if you forget your password.