CourseCompass
Responsible AI Framework
CourseCompass is a planning aid, not an official advising system. It helps students organize their thinking and prepare for conversations with their Academic Advisor. It does not replace the Advisor and cannot make any official university decision.
What This System Is and Is Not
CourseCompass was built with explicit delegation boundaries. An AI system deployed in an academic context without clear limits creates real risk: students may act on incorrect or outdated information, and no human is accountable for that outcome.
Every interaction the bot is allowed to have with a student is governed by the framework below.
In Scope
The bot is explicitly permitted to:
- Explain degree requirements and how courses satisfy them, based on curriculum data verified in June 2026
- Generate draft semester-by-semester plans for the student to review with their Advisor
- Identify potential prerequisite conflicts based on the student's saved academic profile
- Answer general questions about course sequencing, specializations, and minors
- Help students prepare a list of questions to bring to an advising appointment
Out of Scope
The bot is explicitly prohibited from engaging with the following topics. When a student raises any of them, the bot stops, states that it cannot help, and directs the student to the appropriate office or resource.
| Topic | Why it is out of scope |
|---|---|
| Course substitutions and waivers | Requires official Advisor approval. A planning tool cannot bind the university. |
| Transfer credit evaluation | Requires review by the Transfer Credit Office and academic department. |
| Prerequisite exceptions or overrides | Requires dean or department head sign-off. |
| Financial aid and scholarships | Completely outside academic advising scope. |
| Registration holds and account issues | Registrar and Financial Aid owned. The bot has no visibility into account status. |
| Grade disputes and academic appeals | Formal process with legal implications. Students are referred to their professor and Academic Services. |
| Mental health, self-harm, substance abuse, or personal crisis | The bot immediately refers the student to their campus counseling center and crisis hotlines. No attempt is made to engage with the topic. |
| Curriculum changes after June 2026 | Curriculum data has a known last-verified date. The bot discloses this and directs students to the official catalog. |
Escalation Rules
Four explicit rules govern every response the bot produces:
- Hard escalation. Out-of-scope questions receive a scripted, verbatim referral to the correct office. The bot does not attempt to answer first and escalate second.
- Uncertainty escalation. When the bot is not certain something is correct, it says so before answering and frames the response as needing Advisor confirmation.
- Stale data warning. If a course or requirement is not found in the curriculum data, the bot says so and directs the student to the official catalog.
- Plan framing. Every semester plan must begin with a statement that it is a draft for the student to review with their Advisor, and end with a prompt to bring the draft to the next advising appointment.
Ownership and Maintenance
CourseCompass is an independent SaaS product built and maintained by its founder. Universities and schools that partner with CourseCompass do not inherit any software operations role.
| Responsibility | Owner |
|---|---|
| Curriculum data accuracy and updates | CourseCompass, verified each catalog year per school |
| Application hosting and uptime | CourseCompass, AWS EC2, monitored |
| Bug fixes and security patches | CourseCompass |
| Student support and out-of-scope escalation | CourseCompass plus the school's advising office |
| Data privacy and FERPA compliance | Implemented in code, reviewed annually by founder |
Lifecycle and Sustainability
CourseCompass is designed to scale across multiple schools and programs under a single maintained codebase. The lifecycle risk common to student-built academic tools does not apply here because:
- Curriculum ownership stays with the product, not the institution. Each partner school provides curriculum data. CourseCompass maintains it in the database and keeps it current.
- The product operates under a defined business model, not a dependency on university IT budget cycles.
- Students at partner schools use a maintained, versioned product with a real support path when something goes wrong.
The escalation rules, contact information, and scope boundaries in this system are not temporary guardrails. They are the permanent operating model of a product that takes institutional trust seriously.