Fine Print

Fine Print

A Master of Computing (7706) study planner that validates while you plan, instead of after you commit.

ANU’s Programs and Courses holds every enrolment rule, and ISIS enforces them. Both know whether you’re eligible and whether your plan will graduate you — neither tells you. Fine Print surfaces that data when useful: add a course and see what blocks it and what it counts towards.

What good looks like here

Good is that no blocked course is ever shown without its reason: which prerequisite, which session, which permission code. A bare “not eligible” is the failure being replaced.

Good is also failing closed: a course the catalogue doesn’t know is reported unknown, never fine — an app claiming to tell the truth must never silently pass.

spec/ enforces the mechanics of both; it cannot enforce judgement — which readings of ANU’s prose are honest, which simplifications are safe, which gaps are worth naming. That judgement is below.

Two modelling decisions

Prerequisites are temporal. A prerequisite is satisfied only by a course completed in a strictly earlier term — except where ANU’s prose says “completed or be currently studying” (or “currently enrolled in”), modelled as a concurrent: true flag allowing the same term. This is load-bearing — a strictly-earlier-only model would have falsely blocked COMP6120’s real requisite (completed or currently studying COMP6442).

Buckets constrain rather than partition. A course in one bucket doesn’t leave others’ totals alone. Each bucket carries a minimum, some a maximum, and the 8000-level-COMP requirement is an overlay: it counts every 8000-level COMP course toward its own 24-unit minimum regardless of bucket, so one course can count twice.

Data provenance

The original 16 courses are transcribed by hand from ANU Programs and Courses into src/data/seed.json, never scraped at runtime: the compulsory, foundational and project lists for all three years, the HCC specialisation, and the further-computing overlay reference.

The catalogue covers the COMP and ENGN 6000–8000 courses ANU’s course-search API — pinned to the 2027 catalogue regardless of year requested — still lists that also ran in 2026, plus the courses the program rules reference — 72 courses, the extra 56 machine-extracted from each course’s own /2026/course/<code> page. Not guaranteed complete for 2026: the method drops a 2026 course missing from the 2027 index — it missed COMP8410/COMP8715, already seeded by hand.

56 of the 72 have prerequisites this app does not model — their requisiteNote is real ANU prose, the same field the hand-verified 16 carry, but never converted into a structured prereqs rule, except ENGN6628/ENGN8823/ENGN8830, whose ANU pages carry no requisite section, so theirs is empty. An unconverted course must never look like one with no prerequisite: every plan item for one of the 56 carries a named requisites-not-modelled warning citing ANU’s own wording, and its catalogue-table cell reads “Not modelled” rather than “None”.

Four variable-unit courses — COMP8820/ENGN6200/ENGN8602/ENGN8999 — are excluded: their unit value varies by enrolment, and this planner assumes one fixed value per course, so seeding them would mean guessing a number ANU doesn’t fix.

sessions is read off each course’s current Programs and Courses page, not filtered to years this app models: a retired course still shows whichever semester(s) its page last listed, not “no longer offered” — COMP6250/COMP8260 still show 2025’s semesters though ANU has since stopped running them. Seventeen of the 56 additions have no session data at all, so they render “—” and are blocked every term with “no semester on record” — honest, disclosed here rather than left for a reader to discover.

Three simplifications applied to the requisite prose

  1. Program-enrolment clauses are dropped. Every plan here is a Master of Computing plan, so “must be enrolled in the Master of Computing” is satisfied by construction. Where that was the only requirement (COMP6250/COMP8260/COMP8280/MATH6005), the structured rule is empty. COMP6390’s requisite is an OR — Master of Computing enrolment, or 6 units of COMP6442/COMP6710/COMP6720 — so its rule is empty for the same reason, not because enrolment was its only clause.
  2. Out-of-catalogue codes are dropped only where they are OR-options — one alternative among several, though the full prose still shows them. A plan can only contain a catalogued course, so such an option could never be satisfied, and dropping it only tightens the rule. An out-of-catalogue AND-conjunct is a separate requirement, so dropping it would weaken the rule instead; it’s kept via whichever in-catalogue OR-options it has — COMP8410’s two conjuncts each keep only their in-catalogue alternative(s) (COMP6240; COMP6730 or COMP6710).
  3. Incompatibility rules are not modelled at all. “Incompatible with COMP2100” is a real ANU rule this app does not check, though the full prose is still shown.

A known limitation: allocation does not backtrack

Progress allocation is greedy — one pass, bucket sort order, first fit — so an already-invalid plan can name the wrong course as surplus. The 12-unit project bucket: holding COMP8715 (6u) and COMP8830 (12u) allocates COMP8715 first, leaving no room for COMP8830, though COMP8830 alone would have filled the cap exactly. exceeded still fires correctly — only the surplus’s name can be wrong, never on a valid plan. Fixing it needs backtracking search, out of scope here — named instead.

Program requirements are scoped by the year you commenced

ANU holds a student to the program requirements of the Academic Year they commenced, so this app seeds three years of buckets (2024, 2025, 2026); a plan picks a commencement year (2026 default) and is evaluated against that year’s rules. The years differ in shape, not just numbers: the compulsory list is COMP6250/COMP6442/COMP6710/COMP8260 (24 units) for 2024/2025, COMP6120/COMP6442/COMP7710/COMP8280 (30) for 2026; the project bucket is a mandatory 12-unit floor for 2024/2025, an optional 12-unit cap of the same size for 2026; and only 2024’s 8000-level-COMP overlay also counts non-COMP specialisation courses — modelled, but inert here, since the seeded specialisation has no non-COMP members, so the flag changes zero verdicts. spec/program-years.test.ts proves the same plan reports differently depending on which year applies.

The specialisation list is partial

The Human Centred and Creative Computing specialisation’s own Programs and Courses page was never fetched; its member list is seeded with just two courses already in this catalogue — COMP6390/COMP8020 — not the full membership. The specialisation bucket needs 24 units and these two supply only 12, so it stays permanently unmet, and no plan built here can report the degree complete.

Programs and Courses contradicts itself, twice

Neither is a transcription error: ANU disagrees with itself on a compulsory course’s name, named here rather than smoothed over.

What was not built

Incompatibility checking, backtracking allocation, a full specialisation catalogue, and structured prerequisites for the 56 machine-extracted courses: all named above, all deliberate cuts rather than things run out of time for.