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Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

alistair.blog

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Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#81

Post by technological »

madmod wrote: post #73

In high school I was trying to make an app to scrape my grading system Skyward and ended up finding a trivial auth bypass that let me see anyones grades. Knew the school would turn me into a villain if I was discovered even though I was on student council and an honor student so I emailed the principal and got a meeting with him. For some unknown reason my poc didn't work in the meeting so during the meeting I found…

Definitely interested. Would you mind if we had a call or discuss over email and I can post it as blog or podcast

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#82

Post by robin_reala »

alexarena wrote: post #7

Honestly kind of impressed that the HegartyMaths guy independently found this and then handled it without (explicitly) threatening to sue you.

The jump-straight-to-suing approach is to be honest a bit specific to the US. In the UK (like here) it’s more usual to deal with these sorts of things with a kind word, combined with hints of potential problems later.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#83

Post by robin_reala »

strunz wrote: post #80
rippercushions wrote: post #40

Offtopic, but the font in that site drives me up the wall: fixed width with that skinny cursive "f" is like nails on chalkboard.

I actually love it! Anyone know what it is?

DM Mono: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/DM+Mono

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#84

Post by mlex »

rcfox wrote: post #55

When I was in university, I scraped an internal job postings site for students to find internships. The site was terrible- each job description would load in a pop-up window controlled by Javascript, and loading a second description would override the first. It was also really slow and had limited filtering. My version could load job descriptions in new tabs, presented the table on a single page, and you could mark j…

JobMine Plus?

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#85

Post by yaddaor »

lupire wrote: post #25
aabbccsmith wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were champs! We even connected on LinkedIn with Colin afterwards and he actually offered us summer work but that fell through unfortunately.

He didn't pay you for the consulting time you have him?

Money is vain. They got much more out of it and the post very clearly states that.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#86

Post by throwaway74828 »

I also wrote something similar for my university quizzes using Tampermonkey. I noticed that some of the questions from non-graded quizzes would later appear on graded quizzes. There weren't any IDs that I could use and the wording of the questions would usually change a bit. When taking any quiz, it would search the questions on the page against the database. It would scape the questions, do some cleaning like removing stopwords and symbols, and then do a fuzzy string search against the database. It would give a score to each match and display the top 5 best matches. Worked quite well. I would then spend the rest of the time answering the questions that it could not match.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#87

Post by NorwegianDude »

Well done, and nice of you guys to take it down too.

I remember having some fun in high school when windows XP was the thing and handing out software at school was done using USB memory sticks. I wrote a small program just to mess with classmates that copyed itself to the machine when the memory stick was inserted and set itself to run at startup. It also copyed itself to any USB storage that was connected to the machine.

The program didn't do anything other than connect to a server so I could add it to a database along with some basic info, just so I could mess with the right person. It was fun when a USB stick was passed around, and I was the first to get it. So I got access to the the laptops of all my classmates and could mess around with them.

The problem was that it spread like wildfire, and in just a couple of weeks there was thousands of machines and it was spreading exponentially, with no way for me to stop it. That's when I realized that it might have been a stupid idea and that I should probably remove any traces of my involvement.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#88

Post by bb010g »

malthuswaswrong wrote: post #75
aabbccsmith wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't really get that vibe, especially when we called Colin. He was super friendly. But then again, we didn't want to test it and we complied immediately =)

Quoted post unavailable.

Thanks for the casual misogyny.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#90

Post by vertis »

jbman223 wrote: post #29

Reminds me of a passion project I started in high school that went completely viral and took on a life of its own. Wrote a small script for my friends to check their AP scores a few days early. Required high schoolers giving clear text access to their entire CollegeBoard account so I could log on and scrape their scores. Somehow it got posted to Reddit and from that year on, grew wildly. Got to almost 2 million stude…

I remember that kind of thrill. For a while I ran a tool for Etsy before they had an API, circa 2007. What they did have was AMFPHP, powering their flash toys (treasury, etc). I used it to allow sellers to see their sales stats.

Even went to the Etsy office in Brooklyn at one point and had a chat about it. I think some of the team was a bit bemused that I'd essentially extracted a large amount of data. But they took forever to get to the point of having an actual API (and I was one of the early users of this as well).

Eventually it became unsustainable and I shut it down, but it sure was fun having people be passionate about using it and sharing it.

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