How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

Yeah earning that A in Sociology 101 really changed my life's trajectory.

> my first question would not be about the origin but about the embedding itself. The user's input is rendered in the web frontend of blackboard? Why?

I think Blackboard sees this as a convenience feature, i.e. students submit assignments as, say, PDF documents and they can be viewed directly within Blackboard without the extra steps of downloading. Just silly that it works with anything that can interact with web API, but maybe that was requested specifically?

> Is the client js generally allowed to perform http requests outside of the origin domain?

EDIT: By default, yes, but I'm not sure what restrictions can be applied. (I'm misremembering how CORS even works so I took out my previous paragraph.)

In any case, Blackboard probably provided other tools they could use within the domain as well. For example they could probably trigger some sort of user-to-user private messaging and send the token in the body.

When I was in college around Y2K, I took a "Foundations of Music" class offered online- an elective that taught, well, foundations of music, specifically how to read music. Students had to install this janky, low-quality, Windows Visual Basic application and do 100% of the coursework using it. This VB app would output a results file, and then we had to upload it to the professor. Well, I edited the file, and found that it had a primitive CSV-like format where right answers were basically question1=1 and wrong answers were question1=0.

So theoretically, I could have just generated answer files for every single lesson for the whole semester- and a lot of them I did. BUT, I was scared that the final exam was going to be conducted on-campus, where it would be less tenable to be a dirty-rotten-cheating-scumbag.

So I actually had to learn the coursework, and learn how to read music and all its intricacies. (I do not play an instrument unless you count guitar chords.)

When the final exam came, instead of it being on-campus, the professor used the EXACT SAME VB application to run it. It took me about 5 minutes and I scored a 100% on it thanks to notepad.exe.

There's a moral to this story somewhere. I use notepad.exe a lot more these days than I read music, so perhaps it was foreshadowing an IT career?

If you earned that grade honestly a few ideas may stay with you for your entire life and that may change your life, even if imperceptibly. Anything you study has the potential to make you a better, more well rounded, knowledgeable and less ignorant person.

The theory of higher education and a liberal arts degree, is what I'm assuming OP is talking about.

The idea of a liberal arts degree at a university is to create a well-rounded individual. The idea of taking classes outside your major is to learn about life. The idea of even going to college (which is ENTIRELY optional) is to learn. Not just to pass classes and get an A.

This is something that, traditionally, CS and Engineering students like to shit on - as an example, see the other post about Sociology being useless.

The thing is, there are boot camps and trade schools to learn job skills. People are now attending University and complaining about the 'gen ed' courses in their degree because they're not "useful for my future". This is meant to be "not job skills directly connected to what I think I want to grow up to be".

They aren't supposed to get you a job. They're not job skills programs. They're liberal arts programs. They're supposed to make you into a fully realized human. Those other general courses exist because many students enter college not knowing what their passions are, right or wrong.

Source: My career in higher education. One thing has been constant in the decades that I've worked in this field - Engineering and CS students complain about and shit on the 'gen. ed' classes more than any other major. They also don't like hearing that they can just go to trade school or a boot camp if they just want job skills training; which makes no sense to me - trade school is cheaper, and boot camps are shorter in duration.