Built by one student, in public.
You’re being asked to upload an academic transcript to a website you found on the internet. That’s a reasonable thing to be careful about, so here is exactly who is on the other end.
Who
GradGPS is made by Matthew Krokosz, a junior at Penn State studying Enterprise Technology Integration. Not a company, not a team, not a startup with investors — one person, one laptop, and a lot of scraped bulletin pages. Support emails come back from the same person who wrote the parser.
Why
I couldn’t get an advising appointment before my enrollment date. That leaves you with the What-If report in LionPATH, so that’s what I used.
It tells you what you’re missing. It doesn’t tell you what to actually register for, what order things have to go in, or whether you’re still going to finish on time. I sat there thinking this could be better.
Penn State already publishes everything needed to answer those questions — the requirements, the gen-ed rules, an official Suggested Academic Plan for most majors. It just publishes them across dozens of separate pages, written to be read rather than to answer the one question a student actually has: what do I take next semester, and when do I graduate?
So GradGPS closes that gap. It takes the record you already have, matches it against the requirements that are already published, and turns the result into a schedule. I started building it in late May 2026.
What that means for you
- It’s free and it stays free. There is no paid tier planned, no ads, and nothing to upsell you.
- Your data isn’t the business model, because there isn’t one. Your transcript is used to build your plan and nothing else — not sold, not shared for advertising, not sent to any third-party AI service.
- It is not official. GradGPS is not affiliated with or endorsed by Penn State, and it is not academic advising. Confirm your final plan with your adviser.
- It’s a beta, and it shows sometimes. When the audit gets something wrong, telling me is how it gets fixed — that is how most of the catalog bugs so far were found.
For parents and advisers: GradGPS is a student-built planning tool. It reads a transcript the student uploads themselves, stores it encrypted, uses it only to generate that student’s own audit and schedule, and deletes it on request. It does not replace institutional advising and does not claim to. The privacy policy is the full detail.
Get in touch
Bug reports, wrong requirements, a major that isn’t modelled well, or just a question — the contact form goes straight to an inbox that gets read, usually within a day or two. Or email support@gradgps.com.