David Brown | Staff Writer
At FIU, one student is transforming how students choose professors each semester by turning complex institutional data into an accessible platform to help improve course registration decisions.
Every semester, millions of college students turn to Rate My Professor in search of the “right” instructor. During course registration, students read and write anonymous reviews on instructors at their institution to help gauge teaching styles, workloads and class expectations. Now the age-old approach taken by FIU students in finding the perfect hassle-free schedule has been revamped.
Using thousands of university records and student surveys provided by FIU, rising mechanical engineering senior Tanner Croddy developed Stats For Good, a by-students-for-students platform that analyzes instructor grade distributions, average GPAs, grade distributions, and SPOT survey results.
Croddy stated the idea first began with frustration over how difficult it was for students to access and interpret the existing university data.
“I found this issue around a year ago when I was trying to figure out what the average grade for a class was,” he said. “I had heard about a professor who had failed an entire class, and I was trying to see if that was true or not. I figured it out, and it turned out the claim was more hyperbole than fact.”
This later led Croddy to FIU’s Analysis and Information Management department, where he noticed an extensive collection of institutional data and student surveys from 2022 through 2025 being housed. With a conversation with a friend from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who mentioned “Grade Disparity”, a similar platform to Croddy’s idea, he decided to start this project.
With Croddy’s coding background, he wanted Stats For Good to be created with the purpose of showcasing published information that would otherwise be difficult to access and removing the negative biases related to Rate My Professor.
The platform showcases each class, professor and department at FIU, presenting historic GPAs, SPOT scores, and grade distribution, ranking everything on a rank of A, B and C.
Looking ahead, Croddy said he hopes Stats For Good can eventually be sustained by student organizations at FIU, allowing the project to live on after his graduation.
“In a year, I see it hopefully being a bigger site in terms of data, and maybe maintained by a student organization on campus,” he said. “That way it can keep getting updated and more students can use it.”
He adds that he also would like to see a broader adoption among students and faculty to better understand grade trends and course outcomes across departments.
Mark Finlayson, associate professor of computer science and associate director for research and development, said, “It’s impressive to see our students engaging in this kind of innovation, especially to help their fellow students. Projects like this not only showcase our students’ creativity and drive, but also help the FIU student body more broadly.”
Ultimately, Croddy states his hopes for Stats For Good to allow students and faculty a more objective, data-driven perspective to understand course expectations and grading patterns across departments. By revealing significant variations in grading, he hopes he can remove bias to bring better transparency to courses, allowing students to make more informed decisions each semester.
The platform is currently available for student use.
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