10 ms·

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

439 points by zt 13y ago

zoowar 13y ago
Just give us the data and let us decide which application presents it in a form we can consume efficiently.
bonemachine 13y ago
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 questions later. Taken out of context, even a single vindictive or poorly composed review can be fatal to an instructor's career. Failing to take action to suppress their unauthorized distribution can also invite nasty lawsuits. So this doesn't seem to be about "the man" stepping in and quashing student creativity and initiative (as much as some may prefer that narrative). If anything it seems that Yale did the right thing, in this case.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- absolution 13y ago
  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.
  - bonemachine 13y ago
    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.
- jobu 13y ago
  > Taken out of context, even a single vindictive or poorly composed review can be fatal to an instructor's career. Really? Is this something particular to Yale? Instruction was almost an afterthought at the Universities I attended. (Professors were there to get grants and do research.) Many of them only taught the mandated minimum number of classes (often poorly) and even though it was widely known which profs were terrible it seemed have little effect on their careers.
mathattack 13y ago
Is the issue privacy, or making it too easy to compare faculty ratings with one another? In general faculty and class ratings are not popular with tenured faculty who view greatness as synonymous with citations. Tenured faculty also are fighting the "dumbing down of classes to improve ratings". (I'm not sure if this is a reality or not at places like Yale)
sirkneeland 13y ago
I'm sorry, was someone under the impression that Yale or any other institutions of higher education are progressive, cutting-edge institutions employing best practices in IT or cost management? These are reactive, hidebound institutions that have been able to go for at least a century without transformative reforms. They're rather overdue for it.
lesterbuck 13y ago
Maybe I missed something, but wouldn't this work fine as a browser extension? I guess it depends on whether any individual student needed to crawl the whole dataset, or only the subset of courses they are interested in. The Yale administration is very clear that students have access to all the relevant data, so let each student run their own app. The app could build the schedule workbooks in local storage, no external entity required. Professors get the privacy they want, and the students get the convenient view of the data they want.
acangiano 13y ago
My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.
- aspensmonster 13y ago
  Or any inept or incompetent administrator who feels his or her position is threatened by this demonstration of a superior solution to what seems to be a widely faced problem.
  - kamaal 13y ago
    This is so common even among mid managers in almost every big company I've known. Ensure you kill innovation with any and every means you can, else the programmers will look smarter than you.
- alxndr 13y ago
  Looks like ratemyprofessors.com is still kicking after ten (?) years.
  - acangiano 13y ago
    A professor has no pull on an external site. But they can certainly raise a stink within their university.
    - greedo 13y ago
      When I went to UCSD back in the 80's there were the CAPE (Course and Professor Evaluation) books you could purchase. At the end of each quarter, questionnaires were left outside each lecture hall, and collected by a team of entrepreneurs. Some profs allowed the CAPE team to explain the how the rating system worked, but others just tolerated having the questionnaires distributed outside of class. In theory, UCSD could have prohibited this on campus, but they didn't. CAPE books were funny, with great comments and interesting artwork created to illustrate some of the funnier comments. But that was a different era, and physical books weren't as easy to disseminate compared to an website that shows how bad or good a prof/course is.
obblekk 13y ago
Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism. In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner approach to censoring it. The basic reason why Yale doesn't want this information easily accessible is because it would force them to acknowledge that many of the staff are brilliant researchers and absolutely lousy teachers. This notion that thinking freely about tough problems, and having the ability to pass your knowledge down the generations go together isn't true in the hyper-competitive academic environment today. If a professor doesn't publish, he/she can lose tenure, but if a professor doesn't teach well, he/she can have more time to publish. I think the best universities to learn are those where the professors truly want to teach. Where their research isn't an end in itself, but a way to inspire questions for another generation. Yale seems to be asserting that it's not in this category.
- hangonhn 13y ago
  I am confused to why Yale behaved this way. It is a big organization so one part may not behave consistently with the rest. From my experience at Yale, I would disagree with the notion that Yale professors are brilliant researchers and lousy teachers. I've had 1 of those out of almost 50 professors in my 4 years there. I don't know why they made this terrible decision but I don't think teacher quality is the reason.
- mccr8 13y ago
  The professors I had at Yale were all pretty good. Of course, I was a grad student, so I didn't take all that many classes.
- bertil 13y ago
  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 cheaper. Yale understandably knew that such platforms can be useful, but need some tweaking: anonymous reviews tend to aggregate YouTube-grade insults — 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.
sheetjs 13y ago
Were there any updates since the last discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261 (http://162.209.96.128/ http://162.209.96.128/)
dzink 13y ago
Why not just limit access to validated students?
- vxNsr 13y ago
  sounds like the biggest issue was that the ratings were so prominently displayed. Access was secondary and probably another excuse to use as a nail-in-the-coffin type deal.
- Goladus 13y ago
  This is a simple question that very likely has no simple answer. They probably have a mess of different identity management solutions within the various departments, schools, and collaborators; with lots of really old security policies. It's possible no one even realized there was a hole until these guys made their site. Unable to figure out a deep security solution fast enough to keep up with a couple of young hackers, they shut the site down instead.
- arkinus 13y ago
  Access was in fact limited to validated students. I think the administration was concerned about graduate students and others who weren't authorized having access to the data.
  - michaelt 13y ago
    What's the problem with graduate students having access? At the place I went to graduate school we could view the same info as undergraduates in terms of course timetables and instructor evaluations, and it didn't seem to cause any problems.
    - theorique 13y ago
      What's the problem with graduate students having access? Anything in the institution that the bureaucracy does not control completely, represents a "problem" to the bureaucracy.
bertil 13y ago
One of the author posted on Reddit that they had been contacted by the administration and their project was being re-considered.
x0054 13y ago
How about open sourcing the tool. Release the tool as a self hosted solution, and let any one who wants to host it, host it. Or just use for their own purposes. I am not sure if that could get them in trouble, as I am not sure what crazy provisions Yale has in their student honor code. To be safe I would obfuscate my connection to the open source tool, if I were a student.
- pistle 13y ago
  It would still require abuse of credentials and sharing of data which has not been cleared (or may be legally unclearable) for public availability. Just because someone has the ability to use their credentials to view information does not remove legal liability for the use of that data upon the institution providing the data. The reason this got shut down was because there could easily be liability and security concerns - about which a couple of hacking students could give two shits. If the students were, in fact, accepting other students' credentials to access the system in any custom form (pulling data for the particular user vs. harvesting no-account-specific data), and I were on the chopping block for IT security at the uni, you better believe this would be shut down fast. Every single user of that third-party system would be forced to set up a new password and reminded of their obligations for proper handling of their own security. Now, get off my lawn!
orf 13y ago
My University released a web based timetable system that was absolutely shocking - it was an ASP.net based site with the kind of unfriendly interface you expect from a 1990's era intranet site (hint: utterly utterly horrible, it produced one timetable PER MODULE rather than a single combined timetable and every time you selected a module it would refresh the page). I was hungover the day before term started and rather than use that system I hacked together an easier to use alternative from my bed using python + flask in literally 60 minutes and released it[1]. The administration went crazy when hundreds of students started using it and asked me to take it down. While its not as impressive as something made at Yale it seems to be a common theme, I wonder if other universities suffer the same issues. Could be a market opportunity. [1] http://timetables.tomforb.es/ http://timetables.tomforb.es/
- Kluny 13y ago
  > I wonder if other universities suffer the same issues. Could be a market opportunity. Yes and yes. Both the schools I've been to (the local community college and university) have horrible slow Java-based interfaces that haven't been updated in a decade. I have to admit that those lousy systems were part of what motivated me to get into programming in the first place.
- alxndr 13y ago
  I had the thought, but not the hangover and subsequent willpower. Made a half-hearted attempt with Semantic MediaWiki.
- Jake232 13y ago
  Second year University of Hull compsci student here, would just like to thank you for this - it's so much more efficient to use than the official intranet version.
  - 72deluxe 13y ago
    Very interesting! It is a Scientia product. I used to work for a competitor. More coming soon....
- 13y ago
mgkimsal 13y ago
Not at all surprised. "Big campus" is another entrenched "big industry", and disruption is hard. I'm in touch with students every so often that have essentially the same ideas - "let's make it easier for students to do XYZ", where XYZ always involves campus data and/or integrating with campus system. It's damned near impossible, and the reasons are many. Some are valid, some are invalid (obviously, these are my own personal views, nothing more), but the main takeaway is as with most problems, the core issue is not technology, it's politics. Students who have these "we could change the world!" ideas rarely understand that they're not the first person to think of idea X, and that the issue is who you know who can pull the right strings.
- logicchains 13y ago
  At least this is the internet; if the creators remained anonymous, it shouldn't be too hard for them to continue providing the service in spite of the administration's wishes to the contrary. Especially with for instance something like Tor, assuming that's still functional.
  - jarito 13y ago
    Did you read the article? Yale not only attacked the authors of the site, they used their web content filtering software to block it as malicious. Not much can be done about that and still retain you users.
- aestra 13y ago
  Not every campus is like this by far.
tikhonj 13y ago
Some Berkeley students developed a similar service called Ninja Courses[1]. This lets you browse through classes, order textbooks and also shows ratings. (Although all the ratings are submitted by Ninja Courses users, I believe.) It can even automatically build a schedule for you by choosing lectures and sections that don't overlap, optimizing based on user preferences. For example: do you want more morning classes, more afternoon classes, more gaps, less gaps, some days off... This automates away a rather tedious part of choosing your schedule--something I haven't seen in other similar tools (although I haven't looked too closely). Instead of shutting it down, the university used it to build an official Schedule Builder[2]. The official version doesn't have rankings, but exposes other interesting information--in particular, grade distributions. Since then, Ninja Courses has expanded to a bunch of other UC campuses as well. Just thought I'd share a nice success story to counterbalance most of the others :). [1]: http://ninjacourses.com/ http://ninjacourses.com/ [2]: https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/ https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/
- achal 13y ago
  Berkeley's also trying to expose more things via an API: https://developer.berkeley.edu/ https://developer.berkeley.edu/ (it was primitive last time I tried it, but still a nice initiative to prevent the scraping that most sites have to resort to right now)
- gambogi 13y ago
  RIT also has a similar service [1] there's a new ui in the works for the spring, but it's interesting to see how widespread this issue is. Also I have to say RIT has done an awesome job if coordinating with the devs, they give a CVS dump of their course database periodically. [1] http://schedule.csh.rit.edu http://schedule.csh.rit.edu
  - yebyen 13y ago
    This has been around in one form or another since at least 2003 in several iterations, since John Resig made the first version. It may have been the first such "schedule maker" although at that time it did not offer "Course Roulette" which I see it has now!
nicholaides 13y ago
I and some friends made a similar piece of software for our university. They reluctantly started emailing us CSV dumps of the course schedules but eventually stopped. It's surprising how resistant to technology a university with a reputation for engineering can be.
rcfox 13y ago
I had a similar experience at my university (University of Waterloo), which I discussed some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3682163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3682163 In my case, it was internship postings instead of a course calendar, and I was actually "punished" for it.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
xacaxulu 13y ago
These brothers will be successful in spite of Yale. A story like this definitely lends some cred when it comes to hiring time.
sammcd 13y ago
Did the same thing at my college. We crawled their course catalog. They blocked our IP. Our big addition was being able to sort classes by time and day, the university ended up adding that feature, so I guess we got what we wanted?
jamdavswim 13y ago
Say anything you want, as long as it's positive.
mikekij 13y ago
Rename it "Stanford Bluebook+", give Stanford a 4 year license, and transfer.
thinkcomp 13y ago
Seriously, reading this article it's almost as if they're deliberately re-enacting Harvard's response to houseSYSTEM (which included course reviews, scheduling features, and of course, The Facebook) from 11 years ago. It really says something about institutional behavior. There must be some kind of Independent Thinking Students Emergency Playbook they hand out in elite university administrations. As then-President Summmers said on September 15, 2005, “We are a community that is committed to the authority of ideas, rather than to the idea of authority.” What a perfect line to summarize their utter hypocrisy. http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html
0ptical 13y ago
Oberlin did this, too - but the department supported it and I got credit for working on it. https://oprestissimo.com/ https://oprestissimo.com/
kmfrk 13y ago
This bring back memories. I did the same thing at my university way back when - especially back when people still didn't bother to develop for iPhones. I imagine they were afraid that people would get the wrong information, which is fair in a way, but if Yale's website was anything like my university's, then the website would far outweigh the alternative.
DanBC 13y ago
Sometime ago a man made a better version of the Odeon's (a UK cinema chain) website. His version was accessible but also mu h easier to use. People could use his site to buy tickets from Odeon. They shut it down and stuck with their terrible site. I'm on mobile and finding links is frustrating, but here are a few. http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25 http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25 He did some other sites too and as far as I know they all got taken down pretty quickly. It's interesting to see some history of web scraping and how much people protect their, well, i don't know what is being protected there.
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  It's interesting to see some history of web scraping and how much people protect their, well, i don't know what is being protected there. Paychecks.
- polymatter 13y ago
  The original site is at (http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/ http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/) where you can read about Accessible Odeon and how it was shut down.
  - eterm 13y ago
    That's the same guy behind the Accessible UK train timetable ( http://traintimes.org.uk/ http://traintimes.org.uk/ ), which is an absolute life saver when trying to find quick train information on a mobile.
    - polymatter 13y ago
      Thanks for sharing! That site is brilliant.
don_draper 13y ago
Will someone please disrupt Academia? Tenured professors don't want you to see that many suck at teaching so any website that brings that to light is shutdown.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  Problem is that Academia thinks that professors must be good at teaching and research. It's akin to wanting your Librarians to be good at Calculus and Library maintenance. Research and teaching are separate skills, one doesn't imply the other. Research requires great amount of intelligence and imagination and dedication, while teaching is best suited for those that have great speaking abilities, great charism and slightly lower intelligence (it's easier for people of same IQ to relate). Asking to researcher to teach will detract from researching and vice versa. One solution is to have cooldown period of research to focus on teaching. But I think R&D should be kept separate from teaching, but in the same way teaching shouldn't be bogged down by standardization.
rvac 13y ago
Once you understand that these universities are more or less (publicly or privately owned) corporations, their behavior starts making more sense. As far as I know, many of them actually turn a profit.
swombat 13y ago
Ah, embracing innovation the British way. I recall that 6 months before one of those "date the person right next to me" sites picked up in the US, something similar was launched by some students in a UK university (a pretty high-profile one, though I can't remember which one... LSE? Imperial?). Anyway, long story short, the university IT department shut it down on the grounds that it was not appropriate use of IT facilities. Six months later, the same launched in the US and grew insanely fast.
- gjm11 13y ago
  So this is "the British way" even though it's being done at Yale, because you have one anecdote about something semi-similar happening at a university in the UK? (Only semi-similar, because I think you can make a better case for shutting down a dating site using university IT facilities than for shutting down a course-info site not using university IT facilities.)
  - swombat 13y ago
    I'm just taking a pot shot at Britain for this. Clearly, as this example shows, it's not just a British habit.
- ChristianMarks 13y ago
  One acronym: ITIL [1]. The last refuge for the frustrated British Colonialist impulse [2]. [1] Information Technocracy Indoctrination Library. [2] Disclaimer: I am 1/2 British.
edelans 13y ago
We used a quite similar tool (although much more MVP) in my business school in France (ESSEC): we would share a google spreadsheet where we would comment and rate our professors and classes. Although the administration knew about it, they wouldn't accept it officially, which is quite disapointing in my opinion. There are more than 10 years of data in there: the link is transmitted to every promotion.
dasil003 13y ago
With all these negative anecdotes I thought I'd share a counterpoint. In 2001 at my first professional job I was the web manager for the student unions at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. At the time there was an old unmaintained ColdFusion app for student group registration. Having recently been dabbling in PHP for the unions websites, I proposed writing a new student group registration site from scratch in PHP. My manager approved, I gathered requirements from the stakeholders in the office for student activities and 3 months later shiny new mysql-backed PHP registration system. They also did cool things like let me open source the custom CMS I wrote and push forward with a standards based HTML template while the rest of the University was still on a standardized but antiquated table-based template. I realize now that I've been incredibly lucky with the people I've had above me in every single organization I've worked for in the last 15 years.
- pdubs 13y ago
  UMN also allowed some Schedulizer website (now defunct :() to pull their schedules so you could just plug in your courses and search for optimal schedules.
smsm42 13y ago
So Yale students learned an important lesson - some of the staff cares much more about looking good than about helping students, and the administration of Yale would not be on the student's side in this case, because students come and go and the teachers stay.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  Which is a rather odd position because it's the students who pay the bills. Of course, Yale, so it seems, feels safe for being Yale. Let's see where online courses such as the Udacity one that starts today lead. Yale may want to reconsider their position or build their own system so they can have the metrics in place to guide their long-term strategies.
Cyph0n 13y ago
I actually built a similar, albeit simpler, course scheduling website for students of my university, UAEU. I however couldn't improve it because I feared that it might catch the eye of one of the higher-ups and lead to my expulsion. So I've left it as is. Quite a few students are using it, which is more than enough for me. Here's the site (no domain yet): http://nameless-shore-4042.herokuapp.com/ http://nameless-shore-4042.herokuapp.com/
Fuxy 13y ago
Typical American double standard. We promote free speech but don't you dare use it in a way we don't approve. Is that really free speech then? I'm not free to say/do anything you don't approve of. And since when is it ok to threaten disciplinary action on a student that didn't do anything wrong just provided a service students desperately need. It's like me threatening to shoot your family if you don't sell me your house. The second one is clearly illegal this one for some reason is ok can someone enlighten me? We're talking about these people's future in both situations?
- esbranson 13y ago
  Well, technically... Yale has made it clear they would set in motion procedures in which they may decide to no longer to business with these brothers, over this website. If I don't like someone or something someone said, I don't have to do business with them. Yale is no different. Yale is a private organization that may do business with whomever they wish for whatever reason they wish, outside of the public policy decisions of the government. They have decided to utilize this right. Its not that Yale is violating anyone's rights, its that Yale is a making a decision that reflects poorly on their institution. Its the public institution equivalent of [insert bad thing here] to your neighbor because of something they said. Its not a freedom of speech violation to react that way, its just going to lose you alot of respect and alot of business.
- holychiz 13y ago
  let's not go overboard here. it's one institution, not the whole country. see other counter-examples posted here.
kriro 13y ago
Back in the day when I was a student, some other student built a php based support forum with uploads for stuff you wrote during lectures and tests ordered by professor and ratings, discussion about lectures and test prep etc. It was the de facto meeting and exchange place for all things related to that degree and was great value, I skipped quite a few classes that had good material and opted for self study. Must have saved me lots of hours. The most interesting thing was that there wasn't much pure leeching. Most people that used it went out of their way to help new students, provide lessons learned etc. Some professors actually had accounts (sometimes "undercover", was always fun when they got "exposed") The guy started it when he started his BA (equivalent) and wrote his MA thesis about it and then the side faded away when he graduated (but by then there was other stuff available anyways) Wasn't sophisticated at all but man was it useful. Talk about identifying customers and fixing their problems :) /old story
CalRobert 13y ago
The more I reflect on my time at university, the more I realize it was an utter and complete scam. Fortunately I was lucky enough to attend junior college for a year and a half after graduating, took classes that I actually wanted to take instead of whatever BS was prescribed by my program, and didn't deal with manipulative twits for professors who held me hostage, forcing me to do their research for them before they'd let me graduate. The sooner academia dies, the better. I certainly won't shed any tears.
darkhorn 13y ago
Similar web application but it was not punished http://www.metutakvim.com/ http://www.metutakvim.com/
iaygo 13y ago
Is lecture attendance compulsory at Yale?
- hangonhn 13y ago
  IIRC, no.
izietto 13y ago
[XKCD] University Website http://xkcd.com/773/ http://xkcd.com/773/
thetwiceler 13y ago
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/university-acquires-yale-bluebook/ http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/08/01/university-acquires...
- genericuser 13y ago
  I don't feel like you read the article. They state that this site required a Yale login, and Yale is quoted as saying "all the information on the website remains remains available to students on the Yale site" therefore making the information available to the same audience. Also the article discusses Bluebook, it having been developed by students, acquired by Yale, and it being the tool which they found less than ideal to use. It even links to the very same article you link to when talking about it.
- rst 13y ago
  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.
  - chwahoo 13y ago
    The article said that the site required Yale credentials to view the information.
jimbokun 13y ago
My simple question, what has the Yale administration gained by doing this? Now the Washington Post has picked up the story, making them look petty and childish. Does whatever point they are trying to prove offset the PR damage?

439 points by zt 13y ago

Just give us the data and let us decide which application presents it in a form we can consume efficiently.

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 questions later. Taken out of context, even a single vindictive or poorly composed review can be fatal to an instructor's career. Failing to take action to suppress their unauthorized distribution can also invite nasty lawsuits. So this doesn't seem to be about "the man" stepping in and quashing student creativity and initiative (as much as some may prefer that narrative). If anything it seems that Yale did the right thing, in this case.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
absolution 13y ago
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.
- bonemachine 13y ago
  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.
jobu 13y ago
> Taken out of context, even a single vindictive or poorly composed review can be fatal to an instructor's career. Really? Is this something particular to Yale? Instruction was almost an afterthought at the Universities I attended. (Professors were there to get grants and do research.) Many of them only taught the mandated minimum number of classes (often poorly) and even though it was widely known which profs were terrible it seemed have little effect on their careers.

mathattack 13y ago

Is the issue privacy, or making it too easy to compare faculty ratings with one another? In general faculty and class ratings are not popular with tenured faculty who view greatness as synonymous with citations. Tenured faculty also are fighting the "dumbing down of classes to improve ratings". (I'm not sure if this is a reality or not at places like Yale)

sirkneeland 13y ago

I'm sorry, was someone under the impression that Yale or any other institutions of higher education are progressive, cutting-edge institutions employing best practices in IT or cost management? These are reactive, hidebound institutions that have been able to go for at least a century without transformative reforms. They're rather overdue for it.

lesterbuck 13y ago

Maybe I missed something, but wouldn't this work fine as a browser extension? I guess it depends on whether any individual student needed to crawl the whole dataset, or only the subset of courses they are interested in. The Yale administration is very clear that students have access to all the relevant data, so let each student run their own app. The app could build the schedule workbooks in local storage, no external entity required. Professors get the privacy they want, and the students get the convenient view of the data they want.

acangiano 13y ago

My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.

aspensmonster 13y ago
Or any inept or incompetent administrator who feels his or her position is threatened by this demonstration of a superior solution to what seems to be a widely faced problem.
- kamaal 13y ago
  This is so common even among mid managers in almost every big company I've known. Ensure you kill innovation with any and every means you can, else the programmers will look smarter than you.
alxndr 13y ago
Looks like ratemyprofessors.com is still kicking after ten (?) years.
- acangiano 13y ago
  A professor has no pull on an external site. But they can certainly raise a stink within their university.
  - greedo 13y ago
    When I went to UCSD back in the 80's there were the CAPE (Course and Professor Evaluation) books you could purchase. At the end of each quarter, questionnaires were left outside each lecture hall, and collected by a team of entrepreneurs. Some profs allowed the CAPE team to explain the how the rating system worked, but others just tolerated having the questionnaires distributed outside of class. In theory, UCSD could have prohibited this on campus, but they didn't. CAPE books were funny, with great comments and interesting artwork created to illustrate some of the funnier comments. But that was a different era, and physical books weren't as easy to disseminate compared to an website that shows how bad or good a prof/course is.

obblekk 13y ago

Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism. In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner approach to censoring it. The basic reason why Yale doesn't want this information easily accessible is because it would force them to acknowledge that many of the staff are brilliant researchers and absolutely lousy teachers. This notion that thinking freely about tough problems, and having the ability to pass your knowledge down the generations go together isn't true in the hyper-competitive academic environment today. If a professor doesn't publish, he/she can lose tenure, but if a professor doesn't teach well, he/she can have more time to publish. I think the best universities to learn are those where the professors truly want to teach. Where their research isn't an end in itself, but a way to inspire questions for another generation. Yale seems to be asserting that it's not in this category.

hangonhn 13y ago
I am confused to why Yale behaved this way. It is a big organization so one part may not behave consistently with the rest. From my experience at Yale, I would disagree with the notion that Yale professors are brilliant researchers and lousy teachers. I've had 1 of those out of almost 50 professors in my 4 years there. I don't know why they made this terrible decision but I don't think teacher quality is the reason.
mccr8 13y ago
The professors I had at Yale were all pretty good. Of course, I was a grad student, so I didn't take all that many classes.
bertil 13y ago
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 cheaper. Yale understandably knew that such platforms can be useful, but need some tweaking: anonymous reviews tend to aggregate YouTube-grade insults — 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.

sheetjs 13y ago

Were there any updates since the last discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261 (http://162.209.96.128/ http://162.209.96.128/)

dzink 13y ago

Why not just limit access to validated students?

vxNsr 13y ago
sounds like the biggest issue was that the ratings were so prominently displayed. Access was secondary and probably another excuse to use as a nail-in-the-coffin type deal.
Goladus 13y ago
This is a simple question that very likely has no simple answer. They probably have a mess of different identity management solutions within the various departments, schools, and collaborators; with lots of really old security policies. It's possible no one even realized there was a hole until these guys made their site. Unable to figure out a deep security solution fast enough to keep up with a couple of young hackers, they shut the site down instead.
arkinus 13y ago
Access was in fact limited to validated students. I think the administration was concerned about graduate students and others who weren't authorized having access to the data.
- michaelt 13y ago
  What's the problem with graduate students having access? At the place I went to graduate school we could view the same info as undergraduates in terms of course timetables and instructor evaluations, and it didn't seem to cause any problems.
  - theorique 13y ago
    What's the problem with graduate students having access? Anything in the institution that the bureaucracy does not control completely, represents a "problem" to the bureaucracy.

bertil 13y ago

One of the author posted on Reddit that they had been contacted by the administration and their project was being re-considered.

x0054 13y ago

How about open sourcing the tool. Release the tool as a self hosted solution, and let any one who wants to host it, host it. Or just use for their own purposes. I am not sure if that could get them in trouble, as I am not sure what crazy provisions Yale has in their student honor code. To be safe I would obfuscate my connection to the open source tool, if I were a student.

pistle 13y ago
It would still require abuse of credentials and sharing of data which has not been cleared (or may be legally unclearable) for public availability. Just because someone has the ability to use their credentials to view information does not remove legal liability for the use of that data upon the institution providing the data. The reason this got shut down was because there could easily be liability and security concerns - about which a couple of hacking students could give two shits. If the students were, in fact, accepting other students' credentials to access the system in any custom form (pulling data for the particular user vs. harvesting no-account-specific data), and I were on the chopping block for IT security at the uni, you better believe this would be shut down fast. Every single user of that third-party system would be forced to set up a new password and reminded of their obligations for proper handling of their own security. Now, get off my lawn!

orf 13y ago

My University released a web based timetable system that was absolutely shocking - it was an ASP.net based site with the kind of unfriendly interface you expect from a 1990's era intranet site (hint: utterly utterly horrible, it produced one timetable PER MODULE rather than a single combined timetable and every time you selected a module it would refresh the page). I was hungover the day before term started and rather than use that system I hacked together an easier to use alternative from my bed using python + flask in literally 60 minutes and released it[1]. The administration went crazy when hundreds of students started using it and asked me to take it down. While its not as impressive as something made at Yale it seems to be a common theme, I wonder if other universities suffer the same issues. Could be a market opportunity. [1] http://timetables.tomforb.es/ http://timetables.tomforb.es/

Kluny 13y ago
> I wonder if other universities suffer the same issues. Could be a market opportunity. Yes and yes. Both the schools I've been to (the local community college and university) have horrible slow Java-based interfaces that haven't been updated in a decade. I have to admit that those lousy systems were part of what motivated me to get into programming in the first place.
alxndr 13y ago
I had the thought, but not the hangover and subsequent willpower. Made a half-hearted attempt with Semantic MediaWiki.
Jake232 13y ago
Second year University of Hull compsci student here, would just like to thank you for this - it's so much more efficient to use than the official intranet version.
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  Very interesting! It is a Scientia product. I used to work for a competitor. More coming soon....
13y ago

mgkimsal 13y ago

Not at all surprised. "Big campus" is another entrenched "big industry", and disruption is hard. I'm in touch with students every so often that have essentially the same ideas - "let's make it easier for students to do XYZ", where XYZ always involves campus data and/or integrating with campus system. It's damned near impossible, and the reasons are many. Some are valid, some are invalid (obviously, these are my own personal views, nothing more), but the main takeaway is as with most problems, the core issue is not technology, it's politics. Students who have these "we could change the world!" ideas rarely understand that they're not the first person to think of idea X, and that the issue is who you know who can pull the right strings.

logicchains 13y ago
At least this is the internet; if the creators remained anonymous, it shouldn't be too hard for them to continue providing the service in spite of the administration's wishes to the contrary. Especially with for instance something like Tor, assuming that's still functional.
- jarito 13y ago
  Did you read the article? Yale not only attacked the authors of the site, they used their web content filtering software to block it as malicious. Not much can be done about that and still retain you users.
aestra 13y ago
Not every campus is like this by far.

tikhonj 13y ago

Some Berkeley students developed a similar service called Ninja Courses[1]. This lets you browse through classes, order textbooks and also shows ratings. (Although all the ratings are submitted by Ninja Courses users, I believe.) It can even automatically build a schedule for you by choosing lectures and sections that don't overlap, optimizing based on user preferences. For example: do you want more morning classes, more afternoon classes, more gaps, less gaps, some days off... This automates away a rather tedious part of choosing your schedule--something I haven't seen in other similar tools (although I haven't looked too closely). Instead of shutting it down, the university used it to build an official Schedule Builder[2]. The official version doesn't have rankings, but exposes other interesting information--in particular, grade distributions. Since then, Ninja Courses has expanded to a bunch of other UC campuses as well. Just thought I'd share a nice success story to counterbalance most of the others :). [1]: http://ninjacourses.com/ http://ninjacourses.com/ [2]: https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/ https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/

achal 13y ago
Berkeley's also trying to expose more things via an API: https://developer.berkeley.edu/ https://developer.berkeley.edu/ (it was primitive last time I tried it, but still a nice initiative to prevent the scraping that most sites have to resort to right now)
gambogi 13y ago
RIT also has a similar service [1] there's a new ui in the works for the spring, but it's interesting to see how widespread this issue is. Also I have to say RIT has done an awesome job if coordinating with the devs, they give a CVS dump of their course database periodically. [1] http://schedule.csh.rit.edu http://schedule.csh.rit.edu
- yebyen 13y ago
  This has been around in one form or another since at least 2003 in several iterations, since John Resig made the first version. It may have been the first such "schedule maker" although at that time it did not offer "Course Roulette" which I see it has now!

nicholaides 13y ago

I and some friends made a similar piece of software for our university. They reluctantly started emailing us CSV dumps of the course schedules but eventually stopped. It's surprising how resistant to technology a university with a reputation for engineering can be.

rcfox 13y ago

I had a similar experience at my university (University of Waterloo), which I discussed some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3682163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3682163 In my case, it was internship postings instead of a course calendar, and I was actually "punished" for it.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

xacaxulu 13y ago

These brothers will be successful in spite of Yale. A story like this definitely lends some cred when it comes to hiring time.

sammcd 13y ago

Did the same thing at my college. We crawled their course catalog. They blocked our IP. Our big addition was being able to sort classes by time and day, the university ended up adding that feature, so I guess we got what we wanted?

jamdavswim 13y ago

Say anything you want, as long as it's positive.

mikekij 13y ago

Rename it "Stanford Bluebook+", give Stanford a 4 year license, and transfer.

thinkcomp 13y ago

Seriously, reading this article it's almost as if they're deliberately re-enacting Harvard's response to houseSYSTEM (which included course reviews, scheduling features, and of course, The Facebook) from 11 years ago. It really says something about institutional behavior. There must be some kind of Independent Thinking Students Emergency Playbook they hand out in elite university administrations. As then-President Summmers said on September 15, 2005, “We are a community that is committed to the authority of ideas, rather than to the idea of authority.” What a perfect line to summarize their utter hypocrisy. http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html

0ptical 13y ago

Oberlin did this, too - but the department supported it and I got credit for working on it. https://oprestissimo.com/ https://oprestissimo.com/

kmfrk 13y ago

This bring back memories. I did the same thing at my university way back when - especially back when people still didn't bother to develop for iPhones. I imagine they were afraid that people would get the wrong information, which is fair in a way, but if Yale's website was anything like my university's, then the website would far outweigh the alternative.

DanBC 13y ago

Sometime ago a man made a better version of the Odeon's (a UK cinema chain) website. His version was accessible but also mu h easier to use. People could use his site to buy tickets from Odeon. They shut it down and stuck with their terrible site. I'm on mobile and finding links is frustrating, but here are a few. http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25 http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-07-25 He did some other sites too and as far as I know they all got taken down pretty quickly. It's interesting to see some history of web scraping and how much people protect their, well, i don't know what is being protected there.

CamperBob2 13y ago
It's interesting to see some history of web scraping and how much people protect their, well, i don't know what is being protected there. Paychecks.
polymatter 13y ago
The original site is at (http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/ http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/) where you can read about Accessible Odeon and how it was shut down.
- eterm 13y ago
  That's the same guy behind the Accessible UK train timetable ( http://traintimes.org.uk/ http://traintimes.org.uk/ ), which is an absolute life saver when trying to find quick train information on a mobile.
  - polymatter 13y ago
    Thanks for sharing! That site is brilliant.

don_draper 13y ago

Will someone please disrupt Academia? Tenured professors don't want you to see that many suck at teaching so any website that brings that to light is shutdown.

Ygg2 13y ago
Problem is that Academia thinks that professors must be good at teaching and research. It's akin to wanting your Librarians to be good at Calculus and Library maintenance. Research and teaching are separate skills, one doesn't imply the other. Research requires great amount of intelligence and imagination and dedication, while teaching is best suited for those that have great speaking abilities, great charism and slightly lower intelligence (it's easier for people of same IQ to relate). Asking to researcher to teach will detract from researching and vice versa. One solution is to have cooldown period of research to focus on teaching. But I think R&D should be kept separate from teaching, but in the same way teaching shouldn't be bogged down by standardization.

rvac 13y ago

Once you understand that these universities are more or less (publicly or privately owned) corporations, their behavior starts making more sense. As far as I know, many of them actually turn a profit.

swombat 13y ago

Ah, embracing innovation the British way. I recall that 6 months before one of those "date the person right next to me" sites picked up in the US, something similar was launched by some students in a UK university (a pretty high-profile one, though I can't remember which one... LSE? Imperial?). Anyway, long story short, the university IT department shut it down on the grounds that it was not appropriate use of IT facilities. Six months later, the same launched in the US and grew insanely fast.

gjm11 13y ago
So this is "the British way" even though it's being done at Yale, because you have one anecdote about something semi-similar happening at a university in the UK? (Only semi-similar, because I think you can make a better case for shutting down a dating site using university IT facilities than for shutting down a course-info site not using university IT facilities.)
- swombat 13y ago
  I'm just taking a pot shot at Britain for this. Clearly, as this example shows, it's not just a British habit.
ChristianMarks 13y ago
One acronym: ITIL [1]. The last refuge for the frustrated British Colonialist impulse [2]. [1] Information Technocracy Indoctrination Library. [2] Disclaimer: I am 1/2 British.

edelans 13y ago

We used a quite similar tool (although much more MVP) in my business school in France (ESSEC): we would share a google spreadsheet where we would comment and rate our professors and classes. Although the administration knew about it, they wouldn't accept it officially, which is quite disapointing in my opinion. There are more than 10 years of data in there: the link is transmitted to every promotion.

dasil003 13y ago

With all these negative anecdotes I thought I'd share a counterpoint. In 2001 at my first professional job I was the web manager for the student unions at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. At the time there was an old unmaintained ColdFusion app for student group registration. Having recently been dabbling in PHP for the unions websites, I proposed writing a new student group registration site from scratch in PHP. My manager approved, I gathered requirements from the stakeholders in the office for student activities and 3 months later shiny new mysql-backed PHP registration system. They also did cool things like let me open source the custom CMS I wrote and push forward with a standards based HTML template while the rest of the University was still on a standardized but antiquated table-based template. I realize now that I've been incredibly lucky with the people I've had above me in every single organization I've worked for in the last 15 years.

pdubs 13y ago
UMN also allowed some Schedulizer website (now defunct :() to pull their schedules so you could just plug in your courses and search for optimal schedules.

smsm42 13y ago

So Yale students learned an important lesson - some of the staff cares much more about looking good than about helping students, and the administration of Yale would not be on the student's side in this case, because students come and go and the teachers stay.

rbanffy 13y ago
Which is a rather odd position because it's the students who pay the bills. Of course, Yale, so it seems, feels safe for being Yale. Let's see where online courses such as the Udacity one that starts today lead. Yale may want to reconsider their position or build their own system so they can have the metrics in place to guide their long-term strategies.

Cyph0n 13y ago

I actually built a similar, albeit simpler, course scheduling website for students of my university, UAEU. I however couldn't improve it because I feared that it might catch the eye of one of the higher-ups and lead to my expulsion. So I've left it as is. Quite a few students are using it, which is more than enough for me. Here's the site (no domain yet): http://nameless-shore-4042.herokuapp.com/ http://nameless-shore-4042.herokuapp.com/

Fuxy 13y ago

Typical American double standard. We promote free speech but don't you dare use it in a way we don't approve. Is that really free speech then? I'm not free to say/do anything you don't approve of. And since when is it ok to threaten disciplinary action on a student that didn't do anything wrong just provided a service students desperately need. It's like me threatening to shoot your family if you don't sell me your house. The second one is clearly illegal this one for some reason is ok can someone enlighten me? We're talking about these people's future in both situations?

esbranson 13y ago
Well, technically... Yale has made it clear they would set in motion procedures in which they may decide to no longer to business with these brothers, over this website. If I don't like someone or something someone said, I don't have to do business with them. Yale is no different. Yale is a private organization that may do business with whomever they wish for whatever reason they wish, outside of the public policy decisions of the government. They have decided to utilize this right. Its not that Yale is violating anyone's rights, its that Yale is a making a decision that reflects poorly on their institution. Its the public institution equivalent of [insert bad thing here] to your neighbor because of something they said. Its not a freedom of speech violation to react that way, its just going to lose you alot of respect and alot of business.
holychiz 13y ago
let's not go overboard here. it's one institution, not the whole country. see other counter-examples posted here.

kriro 13y ago

Back in the day when I was a student, some other student built a php based support forum with uploads for stuff you wrote during lectures and tests ordered by professor and ratings, discussion about lectures and test prep etc. It was the de facto meeting and exchange place for all things related to that degree and was great value, I skipped quite a few classes that had good material and opted for self study. Must have saved me lots of hours. The most interesting thing was that there wasn't much pure leeching. Most people that used it went out of their way to help new students, provide lessons learned etc. Some professors actually had accounts (sometimes "undercover", was always fun when they got "exposed") The guy started it when he started his BA (equivalent) and wrote his MA thesis about it and then the side faded away when he graduated (but by then there was other stuff available anyways) Wasn't sophisticated at all but man was it useful. Talk about identifying customers and fixing their problems :) /old story

CalRobert 13y ago

The more I reflect on my time at university, the more I realize it was an utter and complete scam. Fortunately I was lucky enough to attend junior college for a year and a half after graduating, took classes that I actually wanted to take instead of whatever BS was prescribed by my program, and didn't deal with manipulative twits for professors who held me hostage, forcing me to do their research for them before they'd let me graduate. The sooner academia dies, the better. I certainly won't shed any tears.

darkhorn 13y ago

Similar web application but it was not punished http://www.metutakvim.com/ http://www.metutakvim.com/

iaygo 13y ago

Is lecture attendance compulsory at Yale?

hangonhn 13y ago
IIRC, no.

izietto 13y ago

[XKCD] University Website http://xkcd.com/773/ http://xkcd.com/773/

thetwiceler 13y ago

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/university-acquires-yale-bluebook/ http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/08/01/university-acquires...

genericuser 13y ago
I don't feel like you read the article. They state that this site required a Yale login, and Yale is quoted as saying "all the information on the website remains remains available to students on the Yale site" therefore making the information available to the same audience. Also the article discusses Bluebook, it having been developed by students, acquired by Yale, and it being the tool which they found less than ideal to use. It even links to the very same article you link to when talking about it.
rst 13y ago
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.
- chwahoo 13y ago
  The article said that the site required Yale credentials to view the information.

jimbokun 13y ago

My simple question, what has the Yale administration gained by doing this? Now the Washington Post has picked up the story, making them look petty and childish. Does whatever point they are trying to prove offset the PR damage?