Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–128 of 128 posts

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#121

Post by chwahoo »

rst wrote: post #83
thetwiceler wrote: post #80

Let's not blow this out of proportion. They scraped private data (that required a Yale login) without permission and accidentally made it available to a wider audience than intended. Yale has historically been very supportive of these things. A couple of years ago, they acquired another very slick course catalog website, Yale Bluebook, for a good chunk of money [1]. [1] http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/08/01/univer…

Yale did eventually force the students to take the site down (or face disciplinary action) --- but their first move was to block it from the campus network, meaning that for a time, everyone outside Yale could see it, but a Yalie who wanted to would have to go off campus to Starbucks.

The article said that the site required Yale credentials to view the information.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#122

Post by bonemachine »

absolution wrote: post #111
bonemachine wrote: post #99

Officials also expressed concerns that the site was making course evaluation information available to individuals not authorized to view the information. Sounds like they have perfectly valid concerns, actually. When it comes to protecting restricted (and potentially rather damaging information) -- which also happens to be the University's property, anyway -- it's generally prudent to suppress the source, and ask que…

The site required Yale credentials to log in Requiring these credentials seems like a perfectly legitimate way to protect this information. Later in the article it mentions other reasons that were more likely to have contributed to the decision that they made.

The main point is that the evaluations are the University's property. It would be irresponsible of them to entrust their protection to a third party -- especially when that third party seems to have set up their site without obtaining the University's permission first.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#123

Post by bertil »

nmodu wrote: post #41
bertil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually…

Your penultimate sentence contains some sweeping generalizations. Not everyone who submits a review for a class is motivated by spite. Of course, as with any voluntary review system, participation will come from those who are strongly opinionated. But that goes both ways (Also, I could be wrong, but I believe that the site only included numeric reviews...leaving no room for reviews such as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!…

No sweeping generalisation: I simply wrote that academic executives react badly (all of them) to senior teachers (some of them) having a break-down after reading poorly written and spiteful reviews (no matter how few of them there are, and there always are some in a campus the size of Yale).

> Some teachers ARE lousy.

Very much so — I am one, and I’ve always told that most of my teachers at my school were criminally bad. (I did take steps to have some of them sent to jail.) I do not remember arguing the opposite.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#124

Post by bertil »

avn2109 wrote: post #119
bertil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually…

One of Yale's peer institutions has an anonymous review site [0] that has been working well for several years now. It doesn't have any YouTube-style vitriol that I can find, though it's possibly aggressively moderated. [0] http://www.culpa.info/

Great example, and I’m assuming that “aggressive moderation” was something that guaranteed its existence, and was what Yale wanted to see confirmed before letting another similar effort grow.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#125

Post by bertil »

mhewett wrote: post #109
bertil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually…

A study showed that 90% of professors rate themselves as good or excellent at teaching. My experience from 18 years in college is that about 2% are excellent and about 20% are good. This is now my second favorite self-rating statistic, after "50% of males rank themselves in the top 10% in athletic ability".

If you read my comment slowly, you'll notice that I do not rate teachers in absolute terms, or on a scale at all — I actually hate that (and, yes, I have grave concerns with your “2%” or “90%” because of that). What I did write was that some teachers, no matter how great, come with details (unmeasurable in most cases) that are problematic: their accent is the most common one; details that can be easily fixed (ask Pigmalion), but that rely on intelligent feedback. No numbers. I don't like numbers.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#126

Post by bertil »

stared wrote: post #117
bertil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually…

At my previous university (University of Warsaw) there was an anonymous wiki for opinions on courses and teachers. And it was useful, and people were civil (insults, which were rare, were being removed by community). So I don't see why anonymous reviews should fail in a similar case.

My girlfriend studied in Poland. Her experience describes the polar opposite of all the anecdotes I heard from most American universities: extremely strict teachers, highly hierarchical relations, vastly more demanding personal work. In such a context, especially if it's espoused by students, I’m assuming that such a feedback community could work with minimal external control.

I strongly doubt that with the ratio of entitled students in the US, and the authority they wage over other students, this would be nearly as functional there.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#127

Post by bertil »

darkarmani wrote: post #108
bertil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually…

> and people who dedicated decades to their expertise do not react well to being openly and repeatedly described as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!” by entitled students who failed after submitting their papers a month late. > “Open” and teenagers with social bias don’t mix nearly as well as one would love. Who cares about that level of reviews? The validity is weighted by the source and level of discourse.

Many such websites don't really expect that, and present teachers by averages of all grades, unweighted by how articulate the review actually was.

I have seen such websites rare last (and publicly shame) very demanding, very good at that level of teaching, socially awkward teachers — in a way so aggressive that can only de described as late-in-life bullying. I was part of a group of students who personally intervened to avoid a suicide.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#128

Post by toomuchtodo »

bsamuels wrote: post #105
datphp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen several schools decide to implement mandatory functionalities using ActiveX... You know the thing that forces you to use the most dreaded program of all times... Edit: I hope you were /s'ing

>You know the thing that forces you to use the most dreaded program of all times... lotus notes?

Internet Explorer.
Post reply on HN