A planning aid, built from research
The theory-driven model is a decision-support tool. It organizes a published research framework into a clear, consistent recommendation, and it is explicit about the limits of what a recommendation can do.
What it does
- Turns a short, identity-focused questionnaire into a recommended four-year math sequence.
- Explains the reasoning in plain language, and for counselors it shows the exact decision rules that produced the plan.
- Lets a student or counselor compare the two goals side by side, so the trade-offs are visible.
- Runs the same way every time. The recommendation is a deterministic lookup, not a prediction from a model that might drift or hallucinate.
What it does not do
- It does not make a placement decision. Placement belongs to the student, family, teachers, and counselor.
- It does not know the student’s full circumstances or the courses a particular school actually offers.
- It does not store any answers or build a profile. Each session stands alone (see below).
- It does not rank students or gate access to courses.
This is a planning aid, not a placement decision. Recommendations come from a research framework and are a starting point for conversations with the student's teachers and counselor. Their goals, their circumstances, and the school's course offerings come first.
Privacy
This version is stateless. Answers are used in your browser to compute a recommendation and are never sent anywhere or saved. There are no accounts, no stored profiles, and no analytics on individual responses. Closing the tab clears everything.
Where it sits
Personalized Plan is built on two models that complement each other. The theory-driven model, the one shown here, turns a published expert framework into rules you can read and check, so its strength is transparency: you can always see why it suggested a course. The data-driven model learns pathways directly from a large longitudinal study with causal machine learning, so its strength is picking up patterns no one wrote down in advance. It has cleared disclosure review and has its own section of this site. The theory-driven model works on its own and does not depend on it.