This is a set of scripts and templates to automatically analyze BYU student comments. It uses a suite of ML algorithms to analyze each comment, and automatically generates a set of static HTML files with various interactive visualizations of the results.
To run the system, the user must provide a BYU "CSV" file containing the comments. This should be structured as a tab-delimited file with four columns, containing a semester indicator, a section indicator, a student ID (currently ignored), and the text of the comment:
F 2016 C S 501R (001) 737967 Best ever!
However, note that this is NOT a standard CSV, as BYU by default generates a CSV with additional lines separating out different questions; the fourth column will sometimes contain a string like the following:
Semester Course Random ID Question: Explained concepts effectively
The reports generated will use these questions to additionally segment the comments.
BYU provides a mechanism to download all of the comments in the proper format; see instructions below.
To run the system, first create a virtual environment and install dependencies:
python -m venv ./autocomment
. ./autocomment/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
Fire up a python terminal and make sure that the proper NLTK packages are installed:
import nltk
nltk.download('wordnet')
Many of the visualizations rely on sentiment analysis (specifically as provided by Google Cloud NLP). Make sure that you have appropriate credentials stored in a json file. The output files also include the name of the professor; this must be supplied as an additional argument
Run the script (assuming our CSV is called comments.csv and our Google credentials are called google.json:
python ./main.py --credentials ./google.json --comments comments.csv --name="John Doe"
The output will be stored in the output/ subdirectory.
The goal is to generate a CSV file containing the comment you want analyzed; for your notebook, this would probably be the comments for all classes that you've taught since your last promotion.
- Go to ratings.byu.edu
- Select "View Student Ratings Reports"
- Click the button "View Reports" next to "Comprehensive report for all courses, beginning with the selected semester/term (2015 to present)"
- Pick the semester and year you want the reports to start from
- Click generate report
- Scroll down about a page. There are a couple of different sections; you need to find the comments section. At the top of the comments section is a button labeled "Download comments .csv file". Click that and save the file.