CourseLink

CourseLink — what it is, how it works, why it wins The problem Every semester a student gets 5–6 syllabi. Each one buries the real schedule — due dates, exam weeks, grade weights, attendance rules, the professor's AI policy — inside 12 pages of PDF prose. The information a student actually needs to plan the term is in there, but it's unstructured, scattered, and worded differently in every course. So students do one of two things: Nothing — they never build a plan, then get surprised by a midterm they "didn't know about." Manual entry — they retype every due date into Notion, Apple Calendar, or a generic planner. Manual entry is the tax that kills every planner. It's why most planning apps have a graveyard of dead accounts: the app is fine, but the setup cost is too high and reality drifts the moment a professor moves a date. CourseLink exists to remove that tax entirely. How it works 1. Upload the syllabus. PDF in. That's the whole setup step. 2. Structured extraction, not a dump. CourseLink parses each syllabus into a typed contract. Every extracted fact carries a status envelope — the part nobody else does: found — stated verbatim in the doc missing — not in the doc needs_review — inferred or ambiguous, so the student confirms before moving on Each field also carries a confidence score, the verbatim source snippet, and the PDF page it came from — so review is a two-second glance at the highlighted line, not a re-read. The parser pulls: Basics — course name, code, section, credits, instructor + email Schedule — meeting days/times/locations, plus async-online detection Office hours — per-instructor blocks Grade weights — percent or points mode, with a running total Policies — attendance, extra credit, submission, and the professor's AI policy graded on a 4-level scale (prohibited → restricted → allowed-if-cited → encouraged) Assignments — every graded item with its due date 3. It becomes a live plan. Assignments become tasks. Meetings and due dates become calendar events (week/time-grid view, ICS export, Google Calendar sync). Grade weights power a grade calculator that shows current and projected grades. An intensity/workload score flags burnout weeks before they hit. 4. It stays connected to reality. Canvas link-out and native deep-linking mean a task opens straight to the assignment in Canvas — the plan points back at the source of truth instead of drifting from it. Why it's the best planner for students It starts from the source of truth, not a blank page. Generic planners (Notion, Todoist, Apple Calendar) make the student be the parser. CourseLink does the parsing. Zero-to-plan is one upload, not an hour of typing. It's built for the actual artifact students are handed. Nothing else treats the syllabus as a first-class input. That's the whole unlock — the syllabus is where the semester is defined, so that's where planning should begin. Confidence-gated accuracy. Because every field says whether it's certain, guessed, or missing, students never silently trust a wrong due date. The needs_review gate turns "AI probably got it right" into "you confirmed the three fields it wasn't sure about." That's the difference between a demo and a plan you'd stake a grade on. It understands coursework, not generic tasks. Grade weights, exam vs. homework, credit hours, AI-use policy, workload intensity — a to-do app has no concept of any of these. CourseLink is domain-native: it knows a 30%-weighted final is not the same as a 2% quiz and plans accordingly. One codebase, everywhere the student is. Web build plus a native iOS/Android app (Despia-wrapped) with push notifications, so deadline reminders reach the phone. Focus/Pomodoro sessions, a citation generator (APA/MLA/Chicago), and shared course schedules round out the actual student workflow — not a generic productivity kit. Ships responsibly. Every new feature launches behind an admin-controlled flag, so students get stable, finished features — never half-built experiments. T