University of Minnesota – Twin Cities mascot Goldy the Gopher

Around midnight on a November night in 2022, Kanishk Kacholia and a few of his colleagues ran around the various halls of the University of Minnesota’s East Bank campus scribbling a message on any whiteboard they could find. The message read, “Don’t be unprepared for registration, go to umn.lol.”

The short and playful URL brought people to a webpage adorned with an image of Goldy Gopher and the words “Gopher Grades!” The website, developed by Kacholia alongside fellow computer science students Samyok Nepal and Joey McIndoo, shows all past grades students received in classes taken at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus to aid students while registering for classes.

When it came time to launch their website, Kacholia said they decided on the enticing domain “umn.lol,” which Nepal had been holding onto for a while.

“We thought, ‘Why not just have it be umn.lol?’” Kacholia said. “It’s short, it’s memorable and it’s funny enough that if we put it on a whiteboard, people are going to be willing to go to that website.”

Gopher Grades is simple. Entering the name of a course or a professor shows a graph of how many students received each letter grade in previous semesters. The website also gives students browsing classes extra information by pulling data from Rate My Professors, a platform where students can rate and leave reviews of professors.

Though Kacholia said Gopher Grades was mainly used by computer science students at first, over time, the website has seen an increase in users. The website now sees students looking for classes across a variety of departments and has been used by over 50,000 people.

Although the concept was not original, Kacholia and others took the idea and ran with it, exploring new possibilities along the way. The current iteration, known as Gopher Grades v2, follows in the footsteps of an earlier version created by University of Minnesota students, who got the idea from a website created by the computer science department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

Kacholia and other developers have expanded on these ideas by adding more class data and new features. One such innovation was a browser extension, which allows students to see the grade data directly overlaid on the university’s Schedule Builder website, visualize their schedule on a map of campus to help plan the logistics of getting between classes and more. 

Those working on the website continue to plan new additions to Gopher Grades, including expanding beyond just the Twin Cities campus.

Kacholia estimates they paid a little over $200 for the data used on their website during the first three semesters of the site being up. However, they no longer have to after the university’s Office of Institutional Data and Research automated the process of providing the data, he said. 

When they were being charged by the university, there were talks of putting ads on the site. With the lowered financial burden, Kacholia said the plans are to keep Gopher Grades free of ads and accessible to all students.

“Having grade data for everyone for a long time is the goal,” he said.