As the 5:00 p.m. Friday course registration deadline looms, some students are turning to a new generative AI tool that promises to make selecting winter quarter classes less stressful.

The inspiration for Cramwell AI came from the now-defunct “uofcourses.com,” which drew from a crowdsourced Excel sheet to list the average times students spent on courses, according to Cramwell AI cofounder Edward Chun (A.B. ’25). When Chun, a student at the Booth School of Business, noticed the website had shut down, he set out to create a replacement.

“I’m making a service that I would have used,” he said.

Although the name, “Cramwell AI”, might suggest otherwise, the freshly launched, student-built website does not provide course help. Instead, students can browse course and professor ratings, consult an AI chatbot for advice on which classes to take, and export customized calendars. As of Tuesday, the site had over 500 registered users, according to Chun.

Chun built the site with his former high school roommate, Chan Hong, a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California (USC). The two entrepreneurs are funding the venture with earnings from Chun’s previous startup, DreamPaint, which coincidentally shares its name with an AI-based deepfake pornographic image generator.

“I’m terrible at names,” remarked Chun, who, nevertheless, has a knack for marketing. He has spent the last few months promoting the site online and posting flyers around campus. Cramwell AI’s official Instagram page, which Chun referred to as the “meme channel,” has garnered over 1,300 followers since late September.

The site is part of a larger, long-standing trend of student-created platforms that consolidate course reviews and mock up schedules. In 2019, USC student JonLuca DeCaro made the first version of the Schedule Helper Chrome extension, now widely used at USC. Many similar tools have since been born.

With the help of generative AI, platforms like Chun’s are easier to build and have added possibilities for features. In recent months, students at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), launched BearRank, and a Brown University student made a course search tool, sharing it anonymously on Reddit. UChicago Genie, developed by fourth-years Conrad Wichmann and Guido Trevisan, enjoyed brief popularity last winter. (Its website domain is no longer in use.)

“Something that is built in-house by a university is almost never sufficient to keep up with students’ demands for data transparency, or just following up with modern UI/UX,” Chun said.

However, administrators have not always welcomed student-built tools, and institutions have rarely adopted them. In 2014, Yale made the controversial decision to shut down Yale Bluebook+. The then Dean of Yale College, Mary Miller, claimed that its presentation of average course ratings without student comments was “misleading and incomplete.” In one rare instance, a similar platform developed by a student-led research group at Stanford University in 2020 received support from administrators.

A tool for students, made by students

Chun first arrived at the College eight years ago, and quickly grew “frustrated by how much information [the University] gatekept.” (Originally in the Class of 2021, Chun took several gap years to complete his military service in Seoul, South Korea, and avoid online schooling during the pandemic.)

UCB, for example, which Chun called “an outlier,” releases average GPA by major each year, unlike UChicago and many other U.S. colleges. Chun attributed the choice to a “difference in culture.”

He found the solution to his problem in a frat. Many frats keep a shared Google Doc “that tells the freshman what classes to take, what professors are good,” he said.

In Chun’s view, official course feedback can be “prone to sample bias,” because the students who tend to leave reviews are “mostly” the ones who have had very positive or negative experiences. When he returned to campus to conduct preliminary product research, he said that some students told him “the official reviews often felt unreliable.”

Students could be more likely to write positive reviews for academic major classes or classes taught by favorite professors, Chun thought, “whereas the newbie who had a bad experience probably won’t leave a review.”

How does Cramwell AI work? Ratings, reviews, and an AI chatbot

This past summer, Chun and Hong conducted over 500 wide-ranging interviews with students, asking them to report time commitments for courses and review professors. The two creators then uploaded the results to the site before it went live. Now, students can also add reviews directly to the site.

Course and professor ratings out of five stars are calculated using a weighted mix of “70 percent official university [course feedback] and 30 percent [our] user surveys,” Chun explained.

Chun, whose student status gives him access to official course feedback, said that only enrolled students can sign up for the site to prevent people outside the University community from accessing the data.

During beta testing sessions, dozens of users also uploaded PDFs of syllabi, lecture slides, and other course material while conversing with the site’s AI chatbot. Early on, test users requested the chatbot, which wasn’t part of the original site but has become a main feature. Trained on the data uploaded to the site, it can answer questions and assist in the course search.

Chun said users often asked the chatbot to help them decide between two courses. “I’m this type of student; I’m more comfortable with readings. So should I take Self or Power?’” he offered as a typical question.

Students are also provided a limited number of “credits” to view course material and can earn additional “credits” by uploading reviews, syllabi, or referring a friend to the site.

Does easier mean better? And plans to add career-oriented course recommendations

Cramwell AI’s marketing relies on the allure of ease, guiding students to “easier courses and professors.”

Chun, who graduated with a degree in economics on the standard track, said that the site aims to help students find a balanced course load, but he understands the appeal of classes that require a low time commitment to succeed.

“I myself don’t think that students should always be taking easy classes at college. That’s just not why we come to UChicago specifically,” he said. “But we’re all very busy as fuck. We don’t need to be taking four honors classes. I did that when I was a freshman, in my first quarter. And I wish someone had warned me against that.”

Chun advised students to keep Cramwell AI open in a separate tab as “a complementary tool,” alongside “official resources the University offers,” such as the course feedback website and My Planner.

He said that he and his cofounder tried to avoid the “nearly impossible” task of constructing a more qualitative system to rate courses, because “the notion of difficulty is so subjective.”

Still, Chun acknowledged that the current ratings could be misleading.

Fewer average hours is not necessarily indicative of an easier class, and a lower professor rating does not mean “that the professor is worse at teaching,” he said. The two founders did not collaborate with professors to gather data, but Chun said that they would be open to it in the future. The site is still very new, and its user base is small, he added.

In the future, Chun and Hong plan to add “more specialized” recommendations based on users’ specific career goals. The site, for example, could offer targeted advice to a student who is “dead serious about getting a finance internship.”

Chun recognized that if students narrow their focus to career outcomes, they might overlook less immediately practical classes worth taking. But, he said, it is not “necessarily a bad thing to take classes based on career, when that gets students the outcome that they want.”

Reviews by alumni who have been successful in their careers could help a student who wants to be “a successful TikTok creator on campus, or go to law school or medical school, or go into academia,” he said.

With pre-registration week almost over and the add-drop period approaching, Chun continues to advertise the service. For now, he and Hong are glad to have the site up and running. “I was looking for a problem to solve for the past three years,” he said. “And this was number three on our note of, like, 200 ideas.”