StudySync

Effortlessly extract, organize, and manage your assignments, exams and other important dates from your institution's syllabi using AI-powered automation.

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Inspiration

As university students, keeping track of assignment deadlines and exam dates can be overwhelming. Our course website, eClass, doesn't always display all due dates, leaving us to manually enter them into Google Calendar. However, this process is tedious, prone to mistakes, and sometimes we miss important deadlines. We realized that every student faces this same struggle—managing multiple syllabi, manually checking for deadlines, and juggling assignments across different courses. This led us to build StudySync: a smart exam and assignment tracker that automatically extracts deadlines from syllabi and displays them in an interactive events list.

What it does

  • Takes in syllabus PDFs
  • Extracts exam and assignment dates automatically
  • Displays deadlines in an interactive event list
  • Allows users to edit and delete events as needed
  • Saves time and prevents missed deadlines!
  • Connects the events to Google Calender and displays it on the same.

How we built it

  • Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (for interactive event lists)
  • Backend: Django (Python)
  • Database: SQLite (for storing extracted events)
  • Authentication: Google OAuth (for secure sign-in)
  • PDF Processing: pdfplumber + dateparser (to extract and interpret dates from syllabus documents)

Workflow: User Signs In via Google OAuth. Uploads a Syllabus (PDF). Our AI scans the document for important dates. Extracted dates are stored in a Django database. Dates appear on the interactive event list for the user to review/edit. Once the user is satisfied with the way the Event appears, the data is transferred to Google Calender for the user to receive future notifications and many more.

Challenges we ran into

  • Inconsistent Syllabus Formats – Professors use different ways to write dates, making it difficult to extract them accurately.
    • Google OAuth Authorization Issues – Only one teammate had access, limiting testing.
    • Django Database Issues – Initially, events were not being retrieved properly due to URL routing errors.
    • Frontend & Backend Syncing – Making sure extracted dates correctly appeared in the event list took debugging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Successfully built a working exam & deadline extraction system.
  • Solved the PDF date extraction challenge with AI-powered parsing.
  • Built a fully functional event list that dynamically updates.
  • Learned how to integrate Google OAuth authentication.
  • Created a tool that can actually help students manage their deadlines!

What we learned

  • How to process PDFs and extract structured data.
  • The importance of clean database design for event tracking.
  • How to debug Django routing and authentication issues.
  • How to integrate frontend and backend smoothly.
  • The power of AI in automating time-consuming student tasks.

What's next for StudySync

  • Multi-User Support – Allow multiple students to collaborate and share event lists.
  • More File Formats – Support Word docs and images for syllabus uploads.
  • Improved AI Extraction – Train the model to better understand different syllabus formats.
  • Mobile-Friendly Version – Make StudySync accessible on mobile devices.
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