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

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/16/yale-students-made-a-better-version-of-its-course-catalog-then-yale-shut-it-down/

by zt • 13 years ago

439 125 13 years ago

washingtonpost.com

acangiano2• 13 years ago

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

aspensmonster• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

alxndr2• 13 years ago

Looks like ratemyprofessors.com is still kicking after ten (?) years.

acangiano2• 13 years ago

A professor has no pull on an external site. But they can certainly raise a stink within their university.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

Ego. In my experience, most problems come down to ego.

theorique2• 13 years ago

Absolutely.

Consider the Assistant Deputy VP for Administrative Affairs who just got sold an official $20M "Enterprise Scale" solution for course registration that worked about as well as healthcare.gov, and a kid comes along and in a couple of weekends, makes something that works better and has more features.

Now the 'unofficial' solution is getting more and more popular and your gold-plated turd of a system that you staked millions of dollars of Official University Budget on is getting mocked mercilessly by the student body.

What do you do?

mattgibson• 13 years ago

I write software for universities and have many experiences that confirm this. It need not necessarily be direct negative reviews, but the perception of power leaving the building or the hands of those who currently wield it. Universities do not normally face the same commercial pressures internally that a company would, so academics often don't take well to it.

Shitty software that management chose themselves and can control is always seen as a better option than letting students run the place.

DiggityDug7• 13 years ago

I do webdev for a big hospital and when we brought up the possibility of patients reviewing their doctors, the doctors got really defensive.

Turns out professionals don't want to be held accountable for the quality of their work. Too bad for them public rating systems are inevitable.

trop• 13 years ago

Some of the defensiveness may come from professional pride... Teaching (and medicine?) is not as easy to rate as, say, a product on Amazon or an Ebay seller. Speaking as a sometime adjunct instructor at a research university, the "course evaluations" represent to me bringing corporate management theory to a theoretically more high-minded institution. As others have commented here, the pressure to publish lowers the priority of teaching for full-time faculty. Bringing in low-paid part-timers to teach is not a healthy response to this, and publicly rating/berating teachers is a band-aid on a situation already lacking in trust and respect.

In a healthy college of Yale's quality, course choices should come from competent individual advising of the students and student-to-student discussion, rather than from ratings and a scheduling algorithm.

Fomite2• 13 years ago

"0/5, Recommended my child be put on the standard vaccine schedule."

blahedo• 13 years ago

Turns out professionals don't want to be held accountable for the quality of their work.

This statement is not supported by the rest of your comment. Your comment supports a slightly different statement (which I also believe is true): professionals don't want customer-satisfaction ratings from a selection-biased poll to be considered as a rating of the quality of their work.

Because, why would they? That's a terrible metric.

obblekk• 13 years 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.

mccr8• 13 years 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.

bertil7• 13 years 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.

nmodu• 13 years ago

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

Some teachers ARE lousy. And some teachers present the course material in an engaging, captivating manner.

And yes, some students are lazy. But others want to learn, preferably from the latter type of professor. Labeling any student who forms an opinion about a professor as an "entitled [student] who failed after submitting a paper a month late" reveals a lack of faith in the ability of a young adult to take a genuine interest in his educational experience.

darkarmani• 13 years ago

and people who dedicated decades to their expertise do not react well to being openly and repeatedly described as “sucks ASS and Booawles!!!!!” by entitled students who failed after submitting their papers a month late.
“Open” and teenagers with social bias don’t mix nearly as well as one would love.

Who cares about that level of reviews? The validity is weighted by the source and level of discourse.

mhewett• 13 years ago

A study showed that 90% of professors rate themselves as good or excellent at teaching. My experience from 18 years in college is that about 2% are excellent and about 20% are good.

This is now my second favorite self-rating statistic, after "50% of males rank themselves in the top 10% in athletic ability".

stared• 13 years ago

At my previous university (University of Warsaw) there was an anonymous wiki for opinions on courses and teachers. And it was useful, and people were civil (insults, which were rare, were being removed by community).

So I don't see why anonymous reviews should fail in a similar case.

avn2109• 13 years ago

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

[0] http://www.culpa.info/

cinquemb2• 13 years ago

Universities today have become a text book example of bureaucracy at its finest. Not to say bureaucracy in itself is good or bad, but I think John Stuart Mill was spot on in his remarks upon them: "A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy". Which I guess in the context of most universities today (at least in the united states from my experience), seem to have become hollow shells of their former selves, or at least towards what most claim to be advocating.

At least that's what came to mind when reading the statement from the university and the students hand-waving remarks that smelled like the typical PR speak we hear in the news (the brown nose kind) upon their reflection on the situation. I can sympathize with the students though, the university threatened to take disciplinary action (whether that means not allowing them to receive a piece of paper from them, or some kind of suspension, who knows) for their efforts in recognizing a problem and applying their knowledge for the betterment of their student body, and maybe with the university staff that had to come to the consensus to do what they did for whatever reasons (maybe ones listed in this thread, but we'll probably never hear a straight answer from them either way). Though this will probably be all forgotten in the upcoming weeks and complacency once more will return to it's familiar home. Rules need to be followed, boots need to be licked, and so it goes on… :S

misterjangles• 13 years ago

I think universities have always been this way. It's ironic because they are places of learning and exploring. But only when the topics do not concern the running of the institution itself.

gmu3• 13 years ago

The concept of tenure is definitely somewhat controversial, but it is incredibly difficult and rare to fire tenured professors. I doubt you could cite many if any examples of professors losing tenure because they're not publishing. (Although sure professors who don't publish probably won't receive tenure in the first place)

mkopinsky• 13 years ago

I assume that OP meant:

If a professor doesn't publish, he/she can lose [a chance to gain] tenure

Fomite2• 13 years ago

There are all manner of things a department can do to make a tenured, non-productive faculty member's life harder. The sudden loss of lab space is a particularly common one.

Also, keep in mind that a good many tenured professors are still in "soft money" positions, and have to bring in grant support for parts of their salary.

aragot• 13 years ago

Start up idea: Glassdoor for universities. It's a worldwide problem and choosing the wrong class can harm your curriculum, you may play of fer to make sales.

... And local universities won't shut it down. Unless, of course, it's filtered by UK's pornitical filter.

shiftpgdn• 13 years ago

Ratemyprofessor.com already does this. My local community college actually advertised that they have "Great Ratemyprofessor.com scores!!".

hangonhn2• 13 years 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.

sheetjs• 13 years ago

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

(http://162.209.96.128/)

dzink• 13 years ago

Why not just limit access to validated students?

vxNsr• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

bertil7• 13 years ago

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

x0054• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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/

alxndr2• 13 years ago

I had the thought, but not the hangover and subsequent willpower. Made a half-hearted attempt with Semantic MediaWiki.

Jake232• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Very interesting! It is a Scientia product. I used to work for a competitor.

More coming soon....

chrismonsanto• 13 years ago

ASP.net? What sorcery! My undergrad website was developed in classic ASP. Our version control was copying files to a networked shared folder.

For an example of how utterly fucked classic ASP is: it has no API for accessing file uploads. If you code it yourself, it disables all of the rest of the parsing (query string, form variables, ...), which you then also have to code yourself. Not to mention the whole "hasn't been supported by Microsoft for a decade" thing.

pyre• 13 years ago

Who would want to upload files via the HTML standard? Shouldn't you be using some sort of SOAP API with an ActiveX control? Or maybe the users should login to their local ActiveDirectory server and transfer the file to a shared folder via SMB/CIFS. /s

nickik• 13 years ago

Hey bro, come back when you have 4 years classic ASP with IE6 requirement on your back.

The most advanced data structure was a array that you had to re-size by hand. Terrible.

krilnon• 13 years ago

Could be a market opportunity.

Perhaps, although I've heard that universities typically (however unfortunate it may be) like to buy huge ERP installations that cost millions but include integrated timetabling / scheduling.

annnnd• 13 years ago

Then I guess it IS a market opportunity. :)

Kluny• 13 years 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.

mgkimsal• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Not every campus is like this by far.

tikhonj• 13 years 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/

[2] https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/

achal• 13 years ago

Berkeley's also trying to expose more things via an API: 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• 13 years 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

yebyen• 13 years 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!

creatio• 13 years ago

How would one start to begin making such an scheduling algorithm? I'm asking for learning purposes. What should I be reading? Or their resources for basic such things...

kriro2• 13 years ago

Constraint programming would be a good start, you can also google nurse scheduling problem.

You might want to research Prolog (since the Prologs tend to have good CS libraries), specifically Eclipse (not to be confused with the IDE): http://eclipseclp.org/

PierreMage• 13 years ago

You can take a look at Discrete Optimization course on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/course/optimization

The next session will start March 4th 2014.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

This can be modelled using MIP (Mixed Integer Programming) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_integer_programming#Integ...

Probably not the best way but it's doable. In fact one of the exercises of the class I took was similar to that (matching Professors to Classes with their constraints and class constraints)

nicholaides• 13 years 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• 13 years 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

In my case, it was internship postings instead of a course calendar, and I was actually "punished" for it.

xacaxulu• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

mikekij• 13 years ago

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

thinkcomp• 13 years 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

0ptical• 13 years ago

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

kmfrk• 13 years 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• 13 years 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

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.

polymatter2• 13 years ago

The original site is at (http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/) where you can read about Accessible Odeon and how it was shut down.

eterm• 13 years ago

That's the same guy behind the Accessible UK train timetable ( http://traintimes.org.uk/ ), which is an absolute life saver when trying to find quick train information on a mobile.

CamperBob2• 13 years 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.

don_draper• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

swombat2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.)

swombat2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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/

Fuxy• 13 years 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?

holychiz• 13 years ago

let's not go overboard here. it's one institution, not the whole country. see other counter-examples posted here.

esbranson• 13 years 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.

kriro2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

iaygo• 13 years ago

Is lecture attendance compulsory at Yale?

hangonhn2• 13 years ago

IIRC, no.

izietto• 13 years ago

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

thetwiceler• 13 years 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...

rst• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

genericuser• 13 years 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.

jimbokun• 13 years 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?

zoowar• 13 years ago

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

bonemachine2• 13 years 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.

absolution• 13 years 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.

bonemachine2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

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

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