AI Course Equivalence Review Agent: A Secure Practice for University Administrative Automation

This project builds a secure AI agent system to automate the course equivalence review process in universities. Through PDF parsing, evidence extraction, and a decision engine, the system converts unstructured documents into decision packages with references, while providing privacy protection and an auditable manual review workflow. The core goal is to address issues like low efficiency and poor consistency in traditional manual reviews, and to implement responsible AI applications for administrative automation.

Project Background

Universities face severe challenges when handling course equivalence reviews and prerequisite substitution applications:

1. Relying on manual review of large amounts of scattered materials (transcripts, syllabi, catalogs, etc.) is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone;
2. Review standards involve subtle judgments, and quality depends on reviewers' experience, making it difficult to ensure consistency and fairness;

To address these pain points, this project builds a secure AI agent system that converts unstructured documents into structured decision packages, ensuring interpretability, privacy protection, and human supervision in the review process.

System Design and Core Modules

Architecture

Frontend-backend separation: Frontend uses React/Vite, backend uses FastAPI, with PostgreSQL database; core components include extraction pipeline, decision engine, and security filter.

Core Modules

1. Extraction Pipeline: Parses PDF documents (supports OCR fallback), extracts structured data such as course information, topic lists, learning outcomes, and grades;
2. Decision Engine: Supports deterministic (rule-based scoring) and LLM (GPT inference) modes. Scoring is based on topic matching (40%), outcome matching (30%), credits (20%), and experiment equivalence (10%). Results are determined based on scores and missing items;
3. Security Filter: Defends against prompt injection attacks through multi-layer mechanisms such as regular expressions, trigger words, and Typoglycemia detection. If the total score is ≥10, it will be rejected.

Security and Audit Features

Auditability

• Each decision is linked to source document references;
• Complete audit logs record all operations;
• Evidence storage marks confidence levels;
• Manual review is a mandatory step.

Privacy Protection

• Student data is stored in isolation;
• Role-based access control;
• Document hash verification for integrity;
• Desensitization of sensitive information.

Prompt Injection Defense

Multi-layer detection mechanisms with configurable rejection thresholds, and detailed detection results are recorded.

Practical Significance and Application Expansion

This project demonstrates a responsible AI administrative automation model:

1. Human-machine collaboration: AI provides suggestions, humans make final decisions;
2. Interpretability: Decisions are supported by clear reasoning and references;
3. Security first: Built-in defense mechanisms;
4. Auditable: Complete logs and evidence chains.

This model can be extended to other scenarios: visa application review, insurance claim assessment, medical pre-authorization review, academic integrity investigation, etc.

Limitations and Future Improvements

Current Limitations

• Only supports specific document formats;
• OCR accuracy depends on document quality;
• LLM mode requires external API calls;
• Committee process is relatively simplified.

Future Directions

• Support more formats (scanned documents, handwritten text);
• Integrate more OCR engines;
• Local LLM deployment;
• Enhance committee collaboration functions;
• Add more review rule configuration options.

Conclusion

The AI Course Equivalence Review Agent project successfully applies LLM technology to university administrative automation while maintaining security, interpretability, and human supervision. Its design concept (AI-assisted rather than replacing human judgment) provides important insights for AI applications in other fields, and is a practical reference implementation for the digital transformation of educational institutions.