KnowPlan: AI Agent for Smart Degree Pathway Planning

A new AI system called KnowPlan has been introduced to assist students in planning their degree pathways by reconstructing university curricula from diverse official sources and optimizing student-specific paths under prerequisite constraints. The system, described in a paper on arXiv (2608.06530), addresses the challenge of integrating information from catalogs, departmental pages, JSON endpoints, and PDFs that lack a common schema. KnowPlan enforces an extraction-first boundary, separating the crawling and planning stages to prevent failures from masking each other. Its CatalogBrowse component explores without access to user profiles, scoring actions by expected marginal gain, and uses deterministic parsing with a span-constrained clause-to-AST model fallback. The paper emphasizes measuring the interface between stages rather than assuming it, highlighting the system's novelty in coupling curriculum reconstruction with personalized planning. This development is significant for educational technology, offering a data-driven approach to degree planning that could improve efficiency and accuracy for students and institutions.