Just weeks before the start of the 2025 fall semester, MSU pursued disciplinary action against information science junior Lucas Campbell for creating Spartan Scheduler, a class search tool.
Campbell launched the website in early August last year, hoping to provide students with an easier way to schedule classes compared to MSU’s Student Information System (SIS).
“I knew it was a problem because I've used the SIS so much. I felt like it was super hard to see all the information about a class easily,” Campbell said. “To me, it was like a fun problem to figure out how I could make it easier.”
Little did he know that not requiring an MSU NetID to access the site, making it public, would violate a campus safety policy implemented in 2024.
Spartan Scheduler prioritized cutting down class scheduling time for students, focusing on information that students want to see first, such as course availability. The website utilized an AI schedule creator, which surveyed users about their class and time preferences and would generate a pre-made schedule based on available classes.
MSUgrades.com and RateMyProfessor.com were also integrated into the site so that students could see everything in one place. You could even tell the AI to prioritize classes with higher average grades or professors with higher RMP ratings.
In the first couple of weeks, he was met with an influx of 14,000 visitors and thankful students messaging him personally about the site. Having only marketed the site on Reddit and Snapchat, Campbell said it gained most of its traction from people naturally clicking on the site while searching the web.
Neuroscience and psychology freshman Shreya Mishra said that one of the biggest benefits of Spartan Scheduler was the ability to see your schedule and how classes could fit into it without having to switch between pages, which she has to do with MSU’s SIS.
“Everyone obviously has troubles with the SIS system. It's not great,” Mishra said. “So, when it [Spartan Scheduler] was first marketed as a better alternative to see classes, I feel like that was probably why there was that initial huge interest in it.”
