Curricular Analytics

[mythbuster]

Has anyone here had experience with the Curricular Analytics tool? https://curricularanalytics.org/

It creates a visual map of your degree plan and calculates various metrics about the impact of each course on overall likelihood of degree completion.

While I like the visuals, I'm wondering if this actually reveals anything unexpected, or is it just a fun toy? It seems like a lot of work to upload a Program of study, just to get confirmation of what you already know (e.g. Gen Chem 1 is a bottle neck for Bio students). It's also unclear to me who runs this site and what they plan to do with the data input.

Any comments would be appreciated.

[Ruralguy]

Its usefulness is probably in aiding in summary and presentation of what you might already know.
Like you say, in a hierarchical major, early tough courses are going to be most problematic, then of course,
any course can be if there's only one option (advanced E&M for a Physics major---pass it or don't). The later impacts are
on fewer people. Presumably, you are already down to say, 10 physics majors at the senior year. Say one or two can't pass a difficult upper level physics or math that has no other options. OK, so then you are down to 8, but you only lost 20%. In early stages, you are losing more than 50%, most likely.

In non-hierarchical majors I suspect you'll see no correlation with anything, but if, for instance, fewer people finish an English major if they take a senior Hemingway course rather than a senior Genre Fiction course like SF, then you have to wonder whether one course was more difficult (and why) or whether there is some weird national trend you can research.   

So, I'd guess it might be worth checking out if free or cheap, probably not worth it if there is an expense.