In the summer of 2020, I created a site called IMSA Grades with the goal of providing grade data for my high school to the public domain. Previously, grade data from my school had been anecdotal; if someone wanted to know about grades from a certain class, they would have to ask people who took that class.
This didn't seem right. Information like this — as long as it is private and anonymous — should be part of the open domain. So, I set out to make this happen.
Because this is sensitive data, privacy was one of my primary concerns. Student and instructor names were never used. Anyways, the first set of data came from a FOIA request from Lucy Liu, a 2018 alumni of IMSA. This data contained grade data by student from 2012 up until 2017. The other set of data was attained by working with the Office of Institutional Research at IMSA. We initially submitted a FOIA request, but ended up getting the data outside of the FOIA request to avoid technicalities.
I was just beginning as a web developer when I built this back in 2020 — I hadn't yet learned react, vue, or angular, and I had just become comfortable with Node. So, I decided to build the site using HTML and Vanilla JavaScript.
The data was formatted as a CSV, so I used a simple JavaScript CSV parser. The charts were courtesy of Chart.js, and the backend (it is rendered on the server) was written with Firebase cloud functions. The site itself is hosted on firebase hosting. Site development started in late May and ran through early August. It was originally published in the IMSA Virtual Campus Facebook page.
So far, the site has over 12,000 pageviews, and the pageviews consistently peak at the beginning of each semester, and I was happy to hear from several students that they found the site valuable. I've found a student graduating in the class of 2023 to maintain the site. I've kept the domain on auto-renew, and hope it continues being a valuable resource to the IMSA community.