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University Student Assist & RAG

A university launched a student assistant to answer questions about courses, deadlines, fees, housing, and campus services. The chatbot used a RAG pipeline over handbooks, timetables, FAQs, and departmental pages. Students reported helpful replies—but occasional outdated guidance, missing citations, and uneven tone. We delivered a reliability program to keep answers current, grounded, and inclusive across faculties and terms.

Objectives

  1. Raise grounded-answer rate on academic and administrative queries.

  2. Improve freshness so responses reflect the latest term and deadlines.

  3. Ensure inclusive tone and safe behaviour for a diverse student body.

  4. Provide continuous oversight as departments update content.

Our Solution

We rebuilt the content flow with scheduled crawls, change detection, and effective-date tags, so retrieval prioritized the latest official sources. We separated retrieval and generation diagnostics, measuring context recall and sufficiency before scoring groundedness and clarity. Prompt templates enforced citations, guidance boundaries, and escalation cues for sensitive topics (fees hardship, mental health). We added channel-aware tone rules for domestic/international students and set up canary evaluations on recent chats to catch outdated links or policy drift before the next intake.

Implementation Highlights

1. Freshness-first retrieval: Effective-date and term metadata; recency re-ranking; dead-link detection with fallbacks.

2. Department-scoped contexts: Faculty-specific filters to avoid cross-department contamination.

3. Citations by design: Inline references with “Learn more” links to the authoritative page and revision date.

4. Sensitive-topic safeguards: Escalation pathways for wellbeing, finance hardship, and immigration status queries.

5. Peak-time resilience: Load exercises around enrolment and results days; intent-based routing for routine vs. complex questions.

Before → After

Before: “Add/drop closes this Friday,” no source; link to last year’s page.​

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After: “Add/drop for Term 1 closes 18 Oct 2025, 17:00 (source: Registry—Key Dates, rev. 16 Oct 2025). Need help? Contact your Programme Office; urgent cases escalate via Student Support.”

Collaboration

Registry and departmental admins supplied authoritative sources and update cadences. We ran short cycles ahead of key academic dates, publishing “quality digests” to student services and IT, and holding office hours for content owners to request new scenarios.

Next Steps

Add multilingual support for priority cohorts, integrate ticketing so unresolved queries create actionable cases, and build faculty-authored snippets that can be promoted into the RAG index with automatic evaluation.

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