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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

#541

Post by ikrenji »

pc86 wrote: post #456
IshKebab wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they didn't want people trading registrations why not just... not allow them to trade reservations? I can't trade plane tickets, and that isn't because of some implied threat.

It's an unintended consequence of the system being so laughably out of date and so poorly designed it doesn't support waitlists. Allowing infinitely large waitlists for a given class - which even in the most convoluted legacy system imaginable is not that big of a challenge - and trading disappears overnight. It's not a problem for the university directly, and fixing it would cost money, so there's no incentive to do…

it's a disgrace that a university administrator makes over a million a year... in a public school to boot

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

#542

Post by cush »

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…

This is just regular old extortion

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

#543

Post by e40 »

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…

> This platform was never intended to be monetized, and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

Hopefully the Streisand Effect will force them to do the right thing.

I upvoted your LinkedIn post.

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

#544

Post by mrguyorama »

maeil wrote: post #227
windexh8er wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of Hashicorp [0]) did something similar to this, but to find open slots in courses he wanted in college according to his blog [1]. You're on the right track. From the linked page: "As I began college, I noticed that the poor technical design of the registration system made it incredibly difficult to get the set of classes I wanted. I developed automated registration software that would det…

I reckon most HNers in such a situation have made the same script, I know I did.

I didn't have to, my college provided fairly functional class scheduling systems. It had integrated wait lists, so you could just sign up and hope someone else drops if needed, and occasionally you could just have the professor add another slot (the college didn't mind the free extra money).

I had this in a state school that isn't even our state's premier state school, and we are not a state known for computer science or anything, why do all these supposedly premier institutions not offer it?

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

#545

Post by The_suffocated »

jccalhoun wrote: post #420
The_suffocated wrote: post #387

“...find partners to trade spots in critical classes after they filled up”. I am not from the USA and I don’t understand the context. What does “trade spots” mean? Does it mean that if I have registered to course A but not course B and my friend have registered to course B but not course A, we can swap our registered courses in the official registration system?

I assume it means that at the start of the semester or just days before it starts that if class A and B are both full but I am enrolled in class A but wanted to drop it and get in class B and you are in class B and wanted in class A then we could swap enrollments.

Is this swap recognised by the uni administration? I mean, after the swap, are you officially enrolled in class B?

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

#546

Post by zzzeek »

eykanal wrote: post #140
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…

Just piling on here because upvotes are not visible. The one thing you can guarantee is that your good faith is not reciprocated by the university. Get a lawyer. To make it easier: it sounds like you're still registered. University of Washington offers Student Legal Services ( https://depts.washington.edu/slsuw/ ). Set up a referral with one of them and talk to them. Even if they're employees of the university and do…

cosign, this story is outrageous, it is Lawyer Time, Now. The university is completely out of line and this has all the makings of a disastrous outcome the way they are operating

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

#547

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#548

Post by dekhn »

phibz wrote: post #262
ra wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relying on good faith won't help you at all. Someone at the uni has taken this personally, and has attacked you. At this point, if you don't defend yourself - that person has won. Please seek legal advice.

Their response on face value doesn't make sense. But if I had to guess, you inadvertently made someone in the registrar's office look bad. They probably had to answer to "why didn't you think of this?" If that is the case then it makes a lot more sense and is retaliatory behavior. You can't undo their insecurity and loss of face. Therefore you should not expect a reasonable response. Act accordingly. Educate yourself…

Yeah, let me give some perspective here.

There's somebody in the registrar's office whose job is to be responsible for the production process of registration. They are minimally staffed and given just enough resources to run that process. Likely at some point their leadership told them they had to make an API so that they could integrate with other systems. Due to poor funding and lack of skills, just doing that is a full time/major job.

Then some student comes along and says "hey look if I scrape this API, I can make an app that helps users! That's what APIs are for, right!?" The student is likely quite smart and probably built something that is useful.

But students aren't full time software engineers. They lack knowledge and context about how to build production systems that handle the load during the registration crush and also don't cause undue load on the backend API servers.

So when the dean comes to the head of IT for Registration, and says "wait, this student just did something that you were supposed to do, and it looked really easy", you just made the IT person's life much harder but didn't actually necessarily solve the problem. Now the IT person has to defend what they have done, while looking bad... and is not getting any further resources to fix the issue.

I think this is a variant of the "why don't you just..." and chesterton's fence. That is, if you're inexperienced, it's often easy to come up with a naive solution without understanding the context, that kind of works but that actually makes things overall worse. For example, what if your app crashed the registration backends during the middle of registration. Are you, the clever student, on call during registration (24/7) for your app, and in contact with the folks who run the registration backends?

It's easy to criticize the IT folks at Colleges but they are not resourced to handle things like this.

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

#549

Post by eddonner »

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…

With apologies if I'm misunderstanding or my glasses are too rose-colored. Is it possible that there are crossed wires here?

You say: "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 register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter."

Is it possible that some tiresome UW admin person has put your account on hold while this is being sorted out, but they haven't connected the dots that you now won't be able to register? Is the "de facto expulsion" an unintended consequence rather than a deliberate punishment?

And then perhaps this person is trying to say, hey, there's a way we could keep your project going if it's an official project, but we don't have budget for it. Let's discuss if that would work for you. And perhaps this was intended to be a suggestion for a positive outcome, rather than an IP-grabbing maneuver.

And when you say, "it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate." I totally get that it feels that way, but is it possible that such an aggressive implication wasn't intended?

This might be wishful thinking on my part. It just seems so hard to believe that anything you've done comes remotely close to actual expulsion, and this idea that you'd be forced to work to graduate seems like a total head-scratcher that wouldn't stand up to any scrutiny. I'm hoping that this is just a poorly-handled, poorly-worded communication from this department.

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

#550

Post by zonkerdonker »

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…

College is not cheap in the US. Going to any university in the US implies a certain amount of wealth, and barring that (scholarship, e.g.) then you must be someone who is incredibly motivated. In either case, spending a few hundred dollars to guaruntee a spot in a required course to keep your studies on track, to be accepted into your major, and to eventually graduate on time is worth AT LEAST a few hundred dollars. Like the other commenter, i also ended up needing to graduate a semester late due to this nonsense, which cost me thousands in actual money, and much more in lost potential income.
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