10 ms·

Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean

123 points by shaufler 13y ago

aioprisan 13y ago
so will they allow the app now?
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  As I read the letter, first they're going to stop providing faculty evaluations, and then they're going to set up a bureaucracy overseeing student-developer use of university resources. After that, they may or may not reallow the app, but as the letter points out: > Just this weekend, we learned of a tool that replicates YBB+'s efforts without violating Yale’s appropriate use policy, and that leapfrogs over the hardest questions before us. Not a huge victory for the students here. :/
  - Einstalbert 13y ago
    Setting up bureaucracies = we're going to take a long time to figure this out, hopefully long enough for everyone to forget this. Then our crappy committee will get nothing accomplished, except this smokescreen act of course.
tsm 13y ago
As much as I would love to sit here carrying on about how Information Wants to be Free, I do appreciate where she's coming from. YBB forced to students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection. YBB+ wrongly suggests that the quality of a class can be reduced to a scalar value. We've complained about this bitterly going the other way. How many app developers are frustrated when they get a one-star review that says, "This app couldn't sync to my online account unless I was connected to the internet. Changing to five stars when that's fixed"? How many Amazon shoppers have seen one-star reviews that say, "The package was damaged during shipping. The return was really easy and I got a replacement in two days, but I wanted it for an event that happened before the replacement came."?
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  > YBB forced [] students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection. This doesn't come close to being true in any sense. Wanting to do something and actually doing it are barely even related concepts.
- jhspaybar 13y ago
  As an app developer who has gotten those reviews, the reality is they don't actually matter. Since everyone gets them, the real question is how many happy and 5 star reviews you get from the rest of your customers. You don't have 3 stars because of the guy that put 1 star, you have 3 stars because of the people who gave it 3, or all the people who didn't feel it was worth it to put down 5 stars. The situation is the same here, at my school when viewing aggregate evaluation data, I find it to be VERY accurate to the actual experience I've had in those classes, and I think that's the issue here. Yale is protecting teachers from being called out for being bad teachers.
  - 3pt14159 13y ago
    I feel like rating systems should be median based. Or bottom 25th percentile based. Those asshats that put 1 star "because it doesn't do x, otherwise 5" ruin 4 other 5 star ratings. When the bottom 25th percentile would still be 5/5.
    - sirrocco 13y ago
      I fully agree with you. For example when I look at Amazon reviews I never look at 5 star or 1 star review. Always 2,3,4 - those come from people that actually had issues - some smaller some larger. Then I can decide: ok, I might encounter these problems but it's something I can live with.
- smackfu 13y ago
  There is already some data that Apple doesn't provide in the app store but that third party sites do collect, namely price history. Being able to see if an app often goes on sale is very useful to the user, but not information that Apple or the developers want to make obvious.
mrt0mat0 13y ago
I think this is a great example of both compromise and overreaction. In the end, they are clearly trying to give students the tools they want, but this should have been the first response, not the second. I can't find it now but the other yale student that wrote the chrome extension was the main catalyst. He took the complaints of Yale and removed them therefore forcing them to find new logic, which they did. Hats off to him.
- Fuxy 13y ago
  That logic was bs from the beginning they just taught they could strong-arm the students into submitting. It's the typical shoot first ask questions later philosophy that intelligent well educated teachers should never have used. If they would have addressed their concerns from the beginning to the students i'm certain they would have complied.
shaufler 13y ago
Original post for context: http://haufler.org/2014/01/19/i-hope-i-dont-get-kicked-out-of-yale-for-this/ http://haufler.org/2014/01/19/i-hope-i-dont-get-kicked-out-o...
- gojomo 13y ago
  Indeed, I think that's what Miller is referring to when she writes in the 2nd-to-last paragraph: Just this weekend, we learned of a tool that replicates YBB+'s efforts without violating Yale’s appropriate use policy, and that leapfrogs over the hardest questions before us.
sevkih 13y ago
So that's what you do with an art degree
synctext 13y ago
"we need to review our policies and practices" Welcome to the 21st century. That single minor incident now escalated into a news item of several days. Lot of lost PR points. All because they feel the need to control the course selection process. Sad.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > All because they feel the need to control the course selection process. It's almost as if the entire purpose of their institution was controlling the course selection process. You know. By offering courses in the first place.
mwexler 13y ago
I did get a chuckle at this backhanded positioning in the very first paragraph (which I highlight in _ _ below). Kind of set the tone of what I expected in the note, but was disappointed to see: "In retrospect, I agree that we could have been more patient in asking the developers to take down _information they had appropriated without permission_, before taking the actions that we did." The entire note has an odd, arrogant read to it. If the new tool in fact provided complete comments as well as numeric scores, Yale would have cheered and saluted them ... but because they didn't, Yale shuts it down? Is that really the issue?
- hmsimha 13y ago
  For future reference, you can italicize a selection on Hacker News by surrounding text with asterisks.
- davidgerard 13y ago
  Yes, I couldn't see the bit that actually constituted an apology.
ilamont 13y ago
To that end, the Teaching, Learning, and Advising Committee, which originally brought teaching evaluations online, will take up the question of how to respond to these developments, and the appropriate members of the IT staff, along with the University Registrar, will review our responses to violations of University policy. In other words, death by committee.
97s 13y ago
So it sounds like to me that they are going to eventually take down the detailed evaluations and end it all. Did anyone else get that feeling?
- girvo 13y ago
  Yep. And it's not over for the people who made this either, I'd wager... This was certainly not much of an apology.
  - 97s 13y ago
    Yea I felt like this was sort of a: Hey we acted too quickly, but we understand you like this. It's still not what we want you doing, and you found away around our policies. So we are probably just gonna take it all down and not give you any information.
kgrin 13y ago
Whenever these cases come up, we tend to look at it with a status-quo bias - assuming that of course this data exists, and it's a question of whether it should be "free" (whatever your interpretation of that term). But in reality, things like YBB+ can impact the existence of the data in the first place - in this particular case, the evaluations existing in as comprehensive a form as they do depends on Yale's explicit sponsorship (having professors hand out the eval forms, etc.) I'm not sure what the policy implication is - there's no easy rule here. But it's worthwhile to keep in mind that "information wants to be free, Yale can't decide how it's used" (an attitude that's a bit of a straw-man, but not too far from what some have argued here) ignores the reality that the next time the Yale faculty debate whether or not to collect and collate evaluations (or whether to have a numeric score component), they may well decide not to. (Which, of course, is a principle that applies to other cases of data collection - sometimes it's best not to collect it, just because you don't know how it'll be [mis-]used...)
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  You sort of have a point; the letter explicitly calls out that they're reconsidering providing this data at all. But... given an adversary's policy of "we will provide this data if and only if it goes unused", there's no reason to give that policy any weight in deciding whether to use the data. If you decide to use it, the policy will kick in and you can't. If you decide not to use it, it's not relevant that it remains technically "available" for other people to also not use. That's not a reason to consider what Yale wants, it's a reason to slam them for being weasels.
  - wvenable 13y ago
    If the university no longer provides the data this seems like a good opportunity for the application developers to manage that data themselves. They already have the students' course information so they could email them at the end of term and get their own evaluations -- removing Yale from the equation entirely.
    - andrewfong 13y ago
pkprosol 13y ago
This is a pretty big setback for Yale in terms of refocusing more on STEM. But they're in good company. I'm sure 10-15 years ago music company executives were similarly pissed off.
- Fomite 13y ago
  I am pretty sure this isn't going to set Yale back in the slightest.
  - chc 13y ago
    What makes you so sure? You think the sort of students who could get into Yale don't have other options?
    - Fomite 13y ago
      I think that, in considering their options, "Yale's stance on a fly-by-night improvement to the course catalog" has a very low weight, and will be forgotten by next admissions season. Because Yale has options too - if a few students decide to make a principled stand, there are others waiting in line just as good who care slightly less.
metaphorm 13y ago
entrenched bureaucratic culture and a wide gap between the students and the faculty. a post facto weak-sauce apology is about what I expected here. I get the distinct impression that what the Dean regrets most is that the story was widely publicized, rather than that her initial reaction was "heavy handed".
ghshephard 13y ago
It's almost certain that Yale will no longer make any course/instructor review information available online as a result of all this. The Dean as much as telegraphed this in his missive.
- sunir 13y ago
  her. Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College. http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/officedetail/454 http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/officedetail/454
- cschmidt 13y ago
  her missive, actually
Mustafabei 13y ago
Well, they should have contacted the developer of the interface beforehand. If that was not plausible, they should have given all the students a heads-up a suitable time before blocking. If they had done all the above, then I don't know what the fuss is all about.
nickflees 13y ago
modify(data) != summarize(data)
- billyhoffman 13y ago
  Indeed. There seems to be a big disconnect here from Yale. They collected this data and made it available. However the Dean and Yale's main problem seems to be [1] that YBB+ wasn't showing all of the data. That the numerical ratings are some how strongly linked by spooky action to the detailed reviews and that you cannot show one without the other. This is, of course, crazy. From simply a UI/design position, you can't easily display/sort on X different professors/courses each of which has 1..N detailed reviews that are blobs of text. From a broader perspective sometimes you need to decouple data to be able to better process it. In fact, given so many students used YBB+ it is reasonable to conclude that YBB+'s presentation of the data is doing a job informing students than Yale's own systems. Everything is a remix [1] From the article: "The tool created by YBB+ set aside the richer body of information available on the Yale website, including student comments, and focused on simple numerical ratings. In doing so, the developers violated Yale’s appropriate use policy by taking and modifying data without permission, but, more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information."
  - jamespollack 13y ago
    well you could do NLP on the reviews and sort it using some lexical grammar. if you're into sorting and all that. mort importantly the ybb reviews are basically useless from a reality perspective due to the way the data is collected (gateway for letter grades) -- they never told you anything important no matter their format, and never will. if you want to know what a professor is like you just ask around or drop in on the class during shopping period. ybb+ is not an improvement on that process. digital equivalent of 'dropping in': coursera or open yale. digital equivalent of 'asking around' ... ? not ybb+ personally i think it would make sense to get each professor to record a video introducing themselves and the material. then skip that awkward first lecture. actual teaching video would be tops...
  - sjburt 13y ago
icambron 13y ago
> In doing so, the developers violated Yale’s appropriate use policy by taking and modifying data without permission, but, more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information. To claim that Yale’s effort to ensure that students received complete information somehow violated freedom of expression turns that principle on its head. I think she doesn't really know what free expression means. It does not mean, "you can say what you want as long as we agree with it." That's certainly how I read "more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information". Free expression means that the administration cannot control the message; people can say what they want. This is OK; win in the marketplace of ideas ("maybe I should evaluate my courses with more contextual information"), not by treating your students as children who can't decide for themselves how to consume information. Also, this bit about reconsidering whether to provide the data at all is childish. "You're not interpreting our data the way we want so now you can't have any! I'm taking my ball and going home!" It's worth remembering (both here and in the thus-far imprecise and confused discussion of who "owns" the data) that the students are the ones providing the evaluations being aggregated here; at the very least, it's unclear why they'd be expected to continue doing so without getting some quid pro quo benefit from it. Stop trying to control everything and trust your students to be smart and thoughtful.
- jsun 13y ago
  Not everyone acts as rational machines, professors' egos have to be stroked too. They'd like to think that they can't just be reduced to a number between 1 and 5. Besides which, I think exposing rating systems for courses creates perverse incentives. It's been well studied that students who get better grades rate courses higher. Is that really what we want to be measuring professors against?
  - chatmasta 13y ago
    Yale students write Yale course reviews in order to see their grade. You get an email saying "a new grade has been posted," then you fill out the review form, then you see your grade.
reubenswartz 13y ago
If by "apologizes" you mean "does not apologize", I guess so. ;-) Universities tend to move very slowly, and I get that these situations can be hard for them, but the whole letter is disingenuous, at best. AFAIK, the students aren't guilty of "modifying data without permission", nor did they "encourage[d] students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information." That's like saying no one should use a course catalog because it doesn't have complete information. Of course scalar averages don't capture the entirety of the feedback on courses. But I bet there's a meaningful difference between 4 stars and 2 stars, or whatever the rating system is, and I'd like to think that Yale students are clever enough o understand this, and to be able to go through more detailed evaluations when it makes sense to them. If the Dean had just said "holy crap, we didn't realize how easy it is to do this and we're freaked out about it, we need you to close this down for now, but please help us build the next generation system", people would have a very different reaction.
joeframbach 13y ago
I can't find the apology in that letter. I see stifling: * "we need to review our policies and practices" -- We're going to make it policy that these ratings are gone. * "We will also state more clearly the requirement/expectation for student software developers" -- The requirements will become more burdensome and bureaucratic, and we will be able to better cover our asses. * "and we will create an easy means for them to do so" -- (I don't buy this one.)
deathanatos 13y ago
> Yale dean […] apologizes Perhaps I'm missing something, but I do not see an apology behind that link. A detail of Yale's reasoning, but not an apology. > However, I disagree that Yale violated its policies on free expression in this situation. I'm not sure what "[Yale's] policies on free expression" are, but my understanding here is that Yale blocked the IP address of a site because it was using some data that Yale published, and modifying it in a way Yale disagreed with. There might be an argument to be had under copyright, but I don't think it's important at the moment. Yale states this: > the developers violated Yale’s appropriate use policy by taking and modifying data without permission, but, more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information. Abusing the fact that you have power over the students' access of information to prevent access to information you disagree with is what people have a problem with; this is especially true when you label something like this "malicious activity". These concerns are not addressed by the dean's letter.
- VLM 13y ago
  I wonder if they act the same way about contentious academic papers. Prof A writes a paper, Prof B writes a rebuttal quoting Prof A's paper, Prof A cries copyright and shuts down Prof B?
- JangoSteve 13y ago
  > I'm not sure what "[Yale's] policies on free expression" are... I would guess that they are referring to Yale's Freedom of Expression Policy: http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression EDIT: While I'm at it, here's what I came up with when I googled "Yale appropriate use policy": http://its.yale.edu/forms-policies/appropriate-use http://its.yale.edu/forms-policies/appropriate-use
akavi 13y ago
Did no one else feel that the biggest issue with the original ip block was not the motivation for the block but rather Yale's blocking of a website on copyright grounds in the first place? Maybe Yale is indeed in the right to try to control use of this data. But Yale most certainly is not in the right to unilaterally block access, regardless of the reasoning. (NB., my concern is not with legal rights, but rather a higher standard of moral or ethical rights that Yale, as a purportedly high-minded institution, should hold itself to.)
tessierashpool 13y ago
Locking down data and requiring that students get approval before working with it fundamentally violates the freedom of intellectual inquiry that any healthy university requires to function.
pg_is_a_butt 13y ago
what a dumb bitch
davmar 13y ago
Han Solo: I must have hit her pretty close to the mark to get her all riled up like that, huh, kid? Yale is going to end up on the wrong side of history in this one. And the irony is that the dean is a professor of history.
meGetEducated 13y ago
If the dean is suggesting that there are limits on the value of single-measure evaluation, I look forward to hearing about what she has in mind for student evaluations. I hope and expect that she will devote the same amount of energy to our long-outdated grading system as she devotes to hiding information about professor evaluations.
malandrew 13y ago
I'm gonna bet that the advisory committee is going to be made up only or at least largely faculty and administration. If they want to do things right, any such advisory committee on the matter should be approximately 50/50 students and faculty with administrative people there to listen and figure out how to overcome and legal issues that may exist that would inhibit the solution that faculty and students come up with together.
zackbloom 13y ago
Censorship is not a valid tool for an educational institution to use. They are free to promote their version of the information, ask people to not use the other, etc. but however much they dislike it, blocking it should not even be considered.
- grecy 13y ago
  Which brings up an interesting question. Does Yale exist because it's an educational institution, or does it exist because it's a money-making enterprise? Can it be both? Coming from a country where higher-education is covered by the government, I think it's a conflict of interest for an educational institute to be in the money-making game
JangoSteve 13y ago
I've mentioned these in a couple responses in this thread, but if anyone is curious, here is Yale's Freedom of Expression Policy: http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression And here is their Appropriate Use Policy: http://its.yale.edu/forms-policies/appropriate-use http://its.yale.edu/forms-policies/appropriate-use The most interesting thing to me about these policies is that the Freedom of Expression Policy explicitly states how crucial it is to be tolerant and accepting of people's ability to express ideas that are "provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox," and that this means they value the ability to "think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable." And yet, they are having a rough time because some students used their data to express an idea in a way they hadn't intended or thought was possible. At the same time, I actually couldn't find a single clause in their Appropriate Use Policy that had been violated. The only restrictions I saw in the policy were that their data be used only for non-commercial and academic purposes (which it was). I didn't see anything about only being able to use data in its intended manner. But maybe I'm missing something (for example, maybe the actual YBB site has its own Appropriate Use Policy separate from their IT policy). EDIT: I also just realized I was looking at the Quick Reference for their Appropriate Use Policy, so maybe there's something else in the full text that was violated: http://policy.yale.edu/policy/1607-information-technology-appropriate-use-policy http://policy.yale.edu/policy/1607-information-technology-ap...
excellence24 13y ago
It probably has to do with how the YBB+ portrayed some teacher in a bad light. The integrity of those 'excellent' professors and tenured careers has to be protected. I wish my university even had all those reviews we do at the end of the year available for all to see. They don't do sh*t with it. I once wasted my time by suggesting my university create an API for students to easily get any data about the school. B/c then we would all see how 'great' some of our professors are and what we each think about them. Sure 3rd party website like 'ratemyprofessor' are good, but they don't have the ease of acquiring rating data like schools do that pass out reviews to each student at the end of a semester. They have to protect the 'wizard of oz' lest we all see who really is behind the curtain.

123 points by shaufler 13y ago

aioprisan 13y ago

so will they allow the app now?

thaumasiotes 13y ago
As I read the letter, first they're going to stop providing faculty evaluations, and then they're going to set up a bureaucracy overseeing student-developer use of university resources. After that, they may or may not reallow the app, but as the letter points out: > Just this weekend, we learned of a tool that replicates YBB+'s efforts without violating Yale’s appropriate use policy, and that leapfrogs over the hardest questions before us. Not a huge victory for the students here. :/
- Einstalbert 13y ago
  Setting up bureaucracies = we're going to take a long time to figure this out, hopefully long enough for everyone to forget this. Then our crappy committee will get nothing accomplished, except this smokescreen act of course.

tsm 13y ago

As much as I would love to sit here carrying on about how Information Wants to be Free, I do appreciate where she's coming from. YBB forced to students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection. YBB+ wrongly suggests that the quality of a class can be reduced to a scalar value. We've complained about this bitterly going the other way. How many app developers are frustrated when they get a one-star review that says, "This app couldn't sync to my online account unless I was connected to the internet. Changing to five stars when that's fixed"? How many Amazon shoppers have seen one-star reviews that say, "The package was damaged during shipping. The return was really easy and I got a replacement in two days, but I wanted it for an event that happened before the replacement came."?

thaumasiotes 13y ago
> YBB forced [] students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection. This doesn't come close to being true in any sense. Wanting to do something and actually doing it are barely even related concepts.
jhspaybar 13y ago
As an app developer who has gotten those reviews, the reality is they don't actually matter. Since everyone gets them, the real question is how many happy and 5 star reviews you get from the rest of your customers. You don't have 3 stars because of the guy that put 1 star, you have 3 stars because of the people who gave it 3, or all the people who didn't feel it was worth it to put down 5 stars. The situation is the same here, at my school when viewing aggregate evaluation data, I find it to be VERY accurate to the actual experience I've had in those classes, and I think that's the issue here. Yale is protecting teachers from being called out for being bad teachers.
- 3pt14159 13y ago
  I feel like rating systems should be median based. Or bottom 25th percentile based. Those asshats that put 1 star "because it doesn't do x, otherwise 5" ruin 4 other 5 star ratings. When the bottom 25th percentile would still be 5/5.
  - sirrocco 13y ago
    I fully agree with you. For example when I look at Amazon reviews I never look at 5 star or 1 star review. Always 2,3,4 - those come from people that actually had issues - some smaller some larger. Then I can decide: ok, I might encounter these problems but it's something I can live with.
smackfu 13y ago
There is already some data that Apple doesn't provide in the app store but that third party sites do collect, namely price history. Being able to see if an app often goes on sale is very useful to the user, but not information that Apple or the developers want to make obvious.

mrt0mat0 13y ago

I think this is a great example of both compromise and overreaction. In the end, they are clearly trying to give students the tools they want, but this should have been the first response, not the second. I can't find it now but the other yale student that wrote the chrome extension was the main catalyst. He took the complaints of Yale and removed them therefore forcing them to find new logic, which they did. Hats off to him.

Fuxy 13y ago
That logic was bs from the beginning they just taught they could strong-arm the students into submitting. It's the typical shoot first ask questions later philosophy that intelligent well educated teachers should never have used. If they would have addressed their concerns from the beginning to the students i'm certain they would have complied.

shaufler 13y ago

Original post for context: http://haufler.org/2014/01/19/i-hope-i-dont-get-kicked-out-of-yale-for-this/ http://haufler.org/2014/01/19/i-hope-i-dont-get-kicked-out-o...

gojomo 13y ago
Indeed, I think that's what Miller is referring to when she writes in the 2nd-to-last paragraph: Just this weekend, we learned of a tool that replicates YBB+'s efforts without violating Yale’s appropriate use policy, and that leapfrogs over the hardest questions before us.

sevkih 13y ago

So that's what you do with an art degree

synctext 13y ago

"we need to review our policies and practices" Welcome to the 21st century. That single minor incident now escalated into a news item of several days. Lot of lost PR points. All because they feel the need to control the course selection process. Sad.

saraid216 13y ago
> All because they feel the need to control the course selection process. It's almost as if the entire purpose of their institution was controlling the course selection process. You know. By offering courses in the first place.

mwexler 13y ago

I did get a chuckle at this backhanded positioning in the very first paragraph (which I highlight in _ _ below). Kind of set the tone of what I expected in the note, but was disappointed to see: "In retrospect, I agree that we could have been more patient in asking the developers to take down _information they had appropriated without permission_, before taking the actions that we did." The entire note has an odd, arrogant read to it. If the new tool in fact provided complete comments as well as numeric scores, Yale would have cheered and saluted them ... but because they didn't, Yale shuts it down? Is that really the issue?

hmsimha 13y ago
For future reference, you can italicize a selection on Hacker News by surrounding text with asterisks.
davidgerard 13y ago
Yes, I couldn't see the bit that actually constituted an apology.

ilamont 13y ago

To that end, the Teaching, Learning, and Advising Committee, which originally brought teaching evaluations online, will take up the question of how to respond to these developments, and the appropriate members of the IT staff, along with the University Registrar, will review our responses to violations of University policy. In other words, death by committee.

97s 13y ago

So it sounds like to me that they are going to eventually take down the detailed evaluations and end it all. Did anyone else get that feeling?

girvo 13y ago
Yep. And it's not over for the people who made this either, I'd wager... This was certainly not much of an apology.
- 97s 13y ago
  Yea I felt like this was sort of a: Hey we acted too quickly, but we understand you like this. It's still not what we want you doing, and you found away around our policies. So we are probably just gonna take it all down and not give you any information.

kgrin 13y ago

Whenever these cases come up, we tend to look at it with a status-quo bias - assuming that of course this data exists, and it's a question of whether it should be "free" (whatever your interpretation of that term). But in reality, things like YBB+ can impact the existence of the data in the first place - in this particular case, the evaluations existing in as comprehensive a form as they do depends on Yale's explicit sponsorship (having professors hand out the eval forms, etc.) I'm not sure what the policy implication is - there's no easy rule here. But it's worthwhile to keep in mind that "information wants to be free, Yale can't decide how it's used" (an attitude that's a bit of a straw-man, but not too far from what some have argued here) ignores the reality that the next time the Yale faculty debate whether or not to collect and collate evaluations (or whether to have a numeric score component), they may well decide not to. (Which, of course, is a principle that applies to other cases of data collection - sometimes it's best not to collect it, just because you don't know how it'll be [mis-]used...)

thaumasiotes 13y ago
You sort of have a point; the letter explicitly calls out that they're reconsidering providing this data at all. But... given an adversary's policy of "we will provide this data if and only if it goes unused", there's no reason to give that policy any weight in deciding whether to use the data. If you decide to use it, the policy will kick in and you can't. If you decide not to use it, it's not relevant that it remains technically "available" for other people to also not use. That's not a reason to consider what Yale wants, it's a reason to slam them for being weasels.
- wvenable 13y ago
  If the university no longer provides the data this seems like a good opportunity for the application developers to manage that data themselves. They already have the students' course information so they could email them at the end of term and get their own evaluations -- removing Yale from the equation entirely.
  - andrewfong 13y ago

pkprosol 13y ago

This is a pretty big setback for Yale in terms of refocusing more on STEM. But they're in good company. I'm sure 10-15 years ago music company executives were similarly pissed off.

Fomite 13y ago
I am pretty sure this isn't going to set Yale back in the slightest.
- chc 13y ago
  What makes you so sure? You think the sort of students who could get into Yale don't have other options?
  - Fomite 13y ago
    I think that, in considering their options, "Yale's stance on a fly-by-night improvement to the course catalog" has a very low weight, and will be forgotten by next admissions season. Because Yale has options too - if a few students decide to make a principled stand, there are others waiting in line just as good who care slightly less.

metaphorm 13y ago

entrenched bureaucratic culture and a wide gap between the students and the faculty. a post facto weak-sauce apology is about what I expected here. I get the distinct impression that what the Dean regrets most is that the story was widely publicized, rather than that her initial reaction was "heavy handed".

ghshephard 13y ago

It's almost certain that Yale will no longer make any course/instructor review information available online as a result of all this. The Dean as much as telegraphed this in his missive.

sunir 13y ago
her. Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College. http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/officedetail/454 http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/officedetail/454
cschmidt 13y ago
her missive, actually

Mustafabei 13y ago

Well, they should have contacted the developer of the interface beforehand. If that was not plausible, they should have given all the students a heads-up a suitable time before blocking. If they had done all the above, then I don't know what the fuss is all about.

nickflees 13y ago

modify(data) != summarize(data)

billyhoffman 13y ago
Indeed. There seems to be a big disconnect here from Yale. They collected this data and made it available. However the Dean and Yale's main problem seems to be [1] that YBB+ wasn't showing all of the data. That the numerical ratings are some how strongly linked by spooky action to the detailed reviews and that you cannot show one without the other. This is, of course, crazy. From simply a UI/design position, you can't easily display/sort on X different professors/courses each of which has 1..N detailed reviews that are blobs of text. From a broader perspective sometimes you need to decouple data to be able to better process it. In fact, given so many students used YBB+ it is reasonable to conclude that YBB+'s presentation of the data is doing a job informing students than Yale's own systems. Everything is a remix [1] From the article: "The tool created by YBB+ set aside the richer body of information available on the Yale website, including student comments, and focused on simple numerical ratings. In doing so, the developers violated Yale’s appropriate use policy by taking and modifying data without permission, but, more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information."
- jamespollack 13y ago
  well you could do NLP on the reviews and sort it using some lexical grammar. if you're into sorting and all that. mort importantly the ybb reviews are basically useless from a reality perspective due to the way the data is collected (gateway for letter grades) -- they never told you anything important no matter their format, and never will. if you want to know what a professor is like you just ask around or drop in on the class during shopping period. ybb+ is not an improvement on that process. digital equivalent of 'dropping in': coursera or open yale. digital equivalent of 'asking around' ... ? not ybb+ personally i think it would make sense to get each professor to record a video introducing themselves and the material. then skip that awkward first lecture. actual teaching video would be tops...
- sjburt 13y ago

icambron 13y ago

> In doing so, the developers violated Yale’s appropriate use policy by taking and modifying data without permission, but, more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information. To claim that Yale’s effort to ensure that students received complete information somehow violated freedom of expression turns that principle on its head. I think she doesn't really know what free expression means. It does not mean, "you can say what you want as long as we agree with it." That's certainly how I read "more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information". Free expression means that the administration cannot control the message; people can say what they want. This is OK; win in the marketplace of ideas ("maybe I should evaluate my courses with more contextual information"), not by treating your students as children who can't decide for themselves how to consume information. Also, this bit about reconsidering whether to provide the data at all is childish. "You're not interpreting our data the way we want so now you can't have any! I'm taking my ball and going home!" It's worth remembering (both here and in the thus-far imprecise and confused discussion of who "owns" the data) that the students are the ones providing the evaluations being aggregated here; at the very least, it's unclear why they'd be expected to continue doing so without getting some quid pro quo benefit from it. Stop trying to control everything and trust your students to be smart and thoughtful.

jsun 13y ago
Not everyone acts as rational machines, professors' egos have to be stroked too. They'd like to think that they can't just be reduced to a number between 1 and 5. Besides which, I think exposing rating systems for courses creates perverse incentives. It's been well studied that students who get better grades rate courses higher. Is that really what we want to be measuring professors against?
- chatmasta 13y ago
  Yale students write Yale course reviews in order to see their grade. You get an email saying "a new grade has been posted," then you fill out the review form, then you see your grade.

reubenswartz 13y ago

If by "apologizes" you mean "does not apologize", I guess so. ;-) Universities tend to move very slowly, and I get that these situations can be hard for them, but the whole letter is disingenuous, at best. AFAIK, the students aren't guilty of "modifying data without permission", nor did they "encourage[d] students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information." That's like saying no one should use a course catalog because it doesn't have complete information. Of course scalar averages don't capture the entirety of the feedback on courses. But I bet there's a meaningful difference between 4 stars and 2 stars, or whatever the rating system is, and I'd like to think that Yale students are clever enough o understand this, and to be able to go through more detailed evaluations when it makes sense to them. If the Dean had just said "holy crap, we didn't realize how easy it is to do this and we're freaked out about it, we need you to close this down for now, but please help us build the next generation system", people would have a very different reaction.

joeframbach 13y ago

I can't find the apology in that letter. I see stifling: * "we need to review our policies and practices" -- We're going to make it policy that these ratings are gone. * "We will also state more clearly the requirement/expectation for student software developers" -- The requirements will become more burdensome and bureaucratic, and we will be able to better cover our asses. * "and we will create an easy means for them to do so" -- (I don't buy this one.)

deathanatos 13y ago

> Yale dean […] apologizes Perhaps I'm missing something, but I do not see an apology behind that link. A detail of Yale's reasoning, but not an apology. > However, I disagree that Yale violated its policies on free expression in this situation. I'm not sure what "[Yale's] policies on free expression" are, but my understanding here is that Yale blocked the IP address of a site because it was using some data that Yale published, and modifying it in a way Yale disagreed with. There might be an argument to be had under copyright, but I don't think it's important at the moment. Yale states this: > the developers violated Yale’s appropriate use policy by taking and modifying data without permission, but, more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information. Abusing the fact that you have power over the students' access of information to prevent access to information you disagree with is what people have a problem with; this is especially true when you label something like this "malicious activity". These concerns are not addressed by the dean's letter.

VLM 13y ago
I wonder if they act the same way about contentious academic papers. Prof A writes a paper, Prof B writes a rebuttal quoting Prof A's paper, Prof A cries copyright and shuts down Prof B?
JangoSteve 13y ago
> I'm not sure what "[Yale's] policies on free expression" are... I would guess that they are referring to Yale's Freedom of Expression Policy: http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression EDIT: While I'm at it, here's what I came up with when I googled "Yale appropriate use policy": http://its.yale.edu/forms-policies/appropriate-use http://its.yale.edu/forms-policies/appropriate-use

akavi 13y ago

Did no one else feel that the biggest issue with the original ip block was not the motivation for the block but rather Yale's blocking of a website on copyright grounds in the first place? Maybe Yale is indeed in the right to try to control use of this data. But Yale most certainly is not in the right to unilaterally block access, regardless of the reasoning. (NB., my concern is not with legal rights, but rather a higher standard of moral or ethical rights that Yale, as a purportedly high-minded institution, should hold itself to.)

tessierashpool 13y ago

Locking down data and requiring that students get approval before working with it fundamentally violates the freedom of intellectual inquiry that any healthy university requires to function.

pg_is_a_butt 13y ago

what a dumb bitch

davmar 13y ago

Han Solo: I must have hit her pretty close to the mark to get her all riled up like that, huh, kid? Yale is going to end up on the wrong side of history in this one. And the irony is that the dean is a professor of history.

meGetEducated 13y ago

If the dean is suggesting that there are limits on the value of single-measure evaluation, I look forward to hearing about what she has in mind for student evaluations. I hope and expect that she will devote the same amount of energy to our long-outdated grading system as she devotes to hiding information about professor evaluations.

malandrew 13y ago

I'm gonna bet that the advisory committee is going to be made up only or at least largely faculty and administration. If they want to do things right, any such advisory committee on the matter should be approximately 50/50 students and faculty with administrative people there to listen and figure out how to overcome and legal issues that may exist that would inhibit the solution that faculty and students come up with together.

zackbloom 13y ago

Censorship is not a valid tool for an educational institution to use. They are free to promote their version of the information, ask people to not use the other, etc. but however much they dislike it, blocking it should not even be considered.

grecy 13y ago
Which brings up an interesting question. Does Yale exist because it's an educational institution, or does it exist because it's a money-making enterprise? Can it be both? Coming from a country where higher-education is covered by the government, I think it's a conflict of interest for an educational institute to be in the money-making game

JangoSteve 13y ago

I've mentioned these in a couple responses in this thread, but if anyone is curious, here is Yale's Freedom of Expression Policy: http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression And here is their Appropriate Use Policy: http://its.yale.edu/forms-policies/appropriate-use http://its.yale.edu/forms-policies/appropriate-use The most interesting thing to me about these policies is that the Freedom of Expression Policy explicitly states how crucial it is to be tolerant and accepting of people's ability to express ideas that are "provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox," and that this means they value the ability to "think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable." And yet, they are having a rough time because some students used their data to express an idea in a way they hadn't intended or thought was possible. At the same time, I actually couldn't find a single clause in their Appropriate Use Policy that had been violated. The only restrictions I saw in the policy were that their data be used only for non-commercial and academic purposes (which it was). I didn't see anything about only being able to use data in its intended manner. But maybe I'm missing something (for example, maybe the actual YBB site has its own Appropriate Use Policy separate from their IT policy). EDIT: I also just realized I was looking at the Quick Reference for their Appropriate Use Policy, so maybe there's something else in the full text that was violated: http://policy.yale.edu/policy/1607-information-technology-appropriate-use-policy http://policy.yale.edu/policy/1607-information-technology-ap...

excellence24 13y ago

It probably has to do with how the YBB+ portrayed some teacher in a bad light. The integrity of those 'excellent' professors and tenured careers has to be protected. I wish my university even had all those reviews we do at the end of the year available for all to see. They don't do sh*t with it. I once wasted my time by suggesting my university create an API for students to easily get any data about the school. B/c then we would all see how 'great' some of our professors are and what we each think about them. Sure 3rd party website like 'ratemyprofessor' are good, but they don't have the ease of acquiring rating data like schools do that pass out reviews to each student at the end of a semester. They have to protect the 'wizard of oz' lest we all see who really is behind the curtain.