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I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

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Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#471

Post by jermaustin1 »

diggan wrote: post #441
zonkerdonker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had managed to build this system during my time at UW, I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project. The class and reservation system there was (and presumably is?) incredibly broken. I remember literally the only way to get a spot reserved in some /mandatory/ courses was to find an upper classman with prioritized registration dates and a…

> I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project Is this normal in the US, that students have high enough disposable income that they would be able to pay "hundreds of dollars" to use a webapp to swap classes with each other? Or is this school uniquely one for the more well-off kids out there? Remembering my time when my friends were in university…

My sister-in-law is going back for her masters right now. She did the maximum allowed loans from her FAFSA, so after her tuition and fees were paid, she had enough left over to draw a $300/wk "salary" from the remaining balance. She has to pay her rent and groceries and other bills from that, but she usually has about $100 a month left over for "fun" - if she lived in a cheaper apartment or took out additional loans, she'd have a lot "left over," and this is what a lot of Americans do.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#472

Post by prophesi »

croemer wrote: post #445
prophesi wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

56 commits, +273,244, -7,270 LOC vs 46 commits, +478, -94 LOC I think it's safe to say it was mostly him.

Don't get fooled by LOCs. Out of the 273k LOC added, all but 20k, that is 253k are just from the boilerplate auto-generated copy/paste initialization code: https://github.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap/commit/e9f0df0d5a221b3c7... Sure he probably did most of the coding, but it's still weird to talk all about I and not mention the other 5 in a single word when they _did_ contribute. Maybe they did testing or other things that a…

I see the point of contention now. Though I don't think we're being fooled by LOC's. You can check the commits from the other contributors, and it's all documentation / adding line breaks. It's unfortunately common at universities for CS projects to be spearheaded by one gungho student with the others only tidying things up for in-class presentations.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#473

Post by burnte »

GrantMoyer wrote: post #88
jdkaim wrote: post #7

Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith. They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to…

> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end. All evidence so far indicates they will not make it right, but instead they may make it even worse. Your faith is wildly misplaced. Seriously, talk to a lawyer. Keep in mind, just because you seek advice from a lawyer doesn't mean you need to take legal action against the school. Talking to a lawyer is not a…

And additionally a lawyer will help make him aware of alternatives he may not know about, and also give him warning as to what other strong arm tactics UW could do, and how to safeguard himself. It's truly a smart idea.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#474

Post by rtkwe »

unethical_ban wrote: post #50
nayuki wrote: post #43

As a non-student, I received an overzealous takedown request from the University of Washington a decade ago. https://github.com/nayuki/Reference-Huffman-coding/issues/1 Also related: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/295420/how-to-cope-...

That is hilariously naive. Particularly in the age of AI, professors might have to go back to the practice of oral exams to have people demonstrate their understanding of an issue. The problem for universities is that means you have to have a lower student:teacher ratio.

Check the date on the issue... it's from 2015 way before (gen) AI was even close to being a thing much less being useful for actual coding.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#475

Post by lkbm »

diggan wrote: post #441
zonkerdonker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had managed to build this system during my time at UW, I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project. The class and reservation system there was (and presumably is?) incredibly broken. I remember literally the only way to get a spot reserved in some /mandatory/ courses was to find an upper classman with prioritized registration dates and a…

> I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project Is this normal in the US, that students have high enough disposable income that they would be able to pay "hundreds of dollars" to use a webapp to swap classes with each other? Or is this school uniquely one for the more well-off kids out there? Remembering my time when my friends were in university…

Some required courses are only taught in Spring or only in Fall. Some of those "Fall only" courses are prerequisites for other required Spring-only courses.

If you can't get into a required course, it can delay your graduation a full year. That costs way more than a couple hundred dollars.

I ended up needing to stay an extra semester for a single course my final semester, because I planned poorly and discovered too late that I couldn't get it in my would-have-been-penultimate semester.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#476

Post by bradlys »

diggan wrote: post #441
zonkerdonker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had managed to build this system during my time at UW, I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project. The class and reservation system there was (and presumably is?) incredibly broken. I remember literally the only way to get a spot reserved in some /mandatory/ courses was to find an upper classman with prioritized registration dates and a…

> I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project Is this normal in the US, that students have high enough disposable income that they would be able to pay "hundreds of dollars" to use a webapp to swap classes with each other? Or is this school uniquely one for the more well-off kids out there? Remembering my time when my friends were in university…

A lot of students at UW - especially ones in the CS department - come from rich families. A lot of foreign students as well - who again - come from a ton of money.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#477

Post by mbernstein »

blitzar wrote: post #381
croemer wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure whether I can trust the story as he presents it. The fact that he might be out for attention is a reason to have doubts, because he might have made the case look more extreme than it is so it trends better. There are a couple of other question marks: - Says he'll graduate this year, but he's only started at UW 1.5y ago, his project team mates also started 1.5y ago, so the course does not seem to be super…

It must have been a survey course. Frankly, I found the course rather elementary.

I remember that class - it was just between recess and lunch!

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#478

Post by hooverd »

lupire wrote: post #442
hooverd wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I don't understand the response to him here. You can just tell the random student who wants the keys to the student database "no" and go about your day.

[flagged]

No, I do. It was an informal usage; they were requesting access to an internal web service and universities don't give that out to every student who asks.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#479

Post by SpaceNugget »

NBJack wrote: post #6

Reminds me of the time my university made headlines!...for attempting to regulate wifi. https://m.slashdot.org/story/49515

I have seen the name pop up before, but I have never actually visited slashdot before. I think it was popular a bit before my time. This link made me heavily reconsider how much "worse" I thought internet discourse had gotten in the past 10 years. It looks like way back in 2004, it was still a bunch of people who didn't read the article before commenting arguing past each other to shout into the void the loudest. I guess that's a bit comforting and a bit sad.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#480

Post by trinsic2 »

joecool1029 wrote: post #325
GrantMoyer wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end. All evidence so far indicates they will not make it right, but instead they may make it even worse. Your faith is wildly misplaced. Seriously, talk to a lawyer. Keep in mind, just because you seek advice from a lawyer doesn't mean you need to take legal action against the school. Talking to a lawyer is not a…

Unlike most of the other commenters I have personal experience fighting a college administration in court. It was a massive time waste and I came out losing a years of my academic career where they lost nothing (money is absolutely not a factor for a large university, nor is stalling court proceedings to waste your life). I'm not even allowed to elaborate deeply on what it was about, the settlement for putting it beh…

Wow this sounds like extortion to me.. I mean not just from the school, but also in the court system. I don't really understand Academia much or if this would effect a person attending another collage, but with something like this, I would drop out of college entirely and take the self-teaching route or online education. I'm not going to allow myself to be subjected to an abusive educational and court system.
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