Sources & AI

Where Our Information Comes From

The substance of UGuide, the programs, requirements, courses, and career numbers, comes from official University of Utah systems and established labor market data:

• The University Catalog. Program descriptions, learning outcomes, degree requirements, course details, and sample four-year plans come from the same curriculum system that powers catalog.utah.edu. UGuide is pinned to the current catalog edition, so what you see here reflects what the catalog publishes for this academic year.
• Academic advising materials. The recommended exploratory courses on major pages were written by University of Utah advising staff. They are hand-picked, not generated.
• Labor market data. Career salaries, job growth projections, and education statistics come from Lightcast, a labor market data provider, organized around the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET occupation system. Skill, ability, and knowledge ratings on career pages come from the same source.
• Student course feedback. The course insights on major pages are summarized from real University of Utah student course evaluations.
• Minors and certificates. Program details come from the university's official catalog data for the current academic year.

Where AI Fits In

We use AI in two ways: to power the interactive features you would expect to be AI, and to write or summarize text on top of the data above.

Interactive features. The major quiz recommendations, the AI exploration chat, the page assistant in the corner of your screen, the comparison tool, the profile summary, and the add-by-name search are all AI features by design. When these features recommend something, they choose from the university's real list of majors and from real occupation titles in the O*NET system. AI picks from the list; it does not invent entries.

Writing and summarizing. Much of the narrative text on the site is drafted with AI, grounded in the data described above. This includes the short descriptions on major and career cards, career overviews, day-in-the-life write-ups, and the student feedback summaries. AI also fills gaps: when an official source has no content for something, such as a program that shipped without a catalog description or a career our data provider has little on, AI drafts that section so the page is still useful.

Where individual pieces of AI-generated content appear on major, minor, and profile pages, they are marked with a small robot icon you can hover over for details. AI requests are routed through OpenRouter to large language model providers, as described in our privacy policy.

What AI Does Not Do

• It does not produce the numbers. Salary figures, job growth projections, and education statistics come straight from labor market data, never from a language model.
• It does not invent majors or careers. Every major on UGuide is a real University of Utah program, and every career maps to a real federal occupation code.
• It does not set degree requirements. Requirements shown on UGuide come from the catalog. In the rare case a catalog record is incomplete and AI drafts a section in its place, that section carries the robot icon.

The Official Record

UGuide is a starting point for exploration, not the official record. For anything that affects your degree, the General Catalog is the authority, and your academic advisor is the best person to talk it through with. If something on this site looks wrong or out of date, we want to hear about it.

Questions

If you have questions about our sources or how we use AI, contact the Academic Innovation + Intelligence Lab at uguide@utah.edu.