
Student Is Sanctioned for Creating Class-Registration Web Site - robertwalsh0
http://ucouldfinish.com/
======
gergles
I especially enjoy the University's ludicrous overreaction (seriously, read
the letters they sent this guy; specifically the one where they demand he do
the job of the "myUCF" team and come up with how he would update the
application -- wherein he is specifically forbidden from saying he'd write
something like the app that people obviously found useful since, you know,
they were using it.)

I also enjoy that he has to attend a 'coaching session' where they teach him
that University policy is sacrosanct -- and _he has to pay for it_ as well as
write a "spelled-checked [sic]" research paper about his coaching session (WTF
is there to 'research' about an hourlong chat?)

What's even more bizarre is why this app exists at all. PeopleSoft's "SA"
module that UCF is using for registration _includes a waitlist feature_ that
already does all of this -- actually, it's better, because it just pops people
off the stack when a spot becomes available.

So, let's be clear:

\- UCF willfully refuses to enable the waitlist option in PS

\- Student uses a public interface to replicate the functionality

\- Star chamber declares the student broke a nebulous IT policy and that he
has to write humiliating 'research papers' as contrition.

And people wonder why higher ed is less and less valued...

~~~
bstrand
Was it a public interface? My read is that his app was logging in to the
university system with his personal credentials.

It's not clear why there couldn't be a public read-only interface for that
data, and it's a shame the U wasn't willing to work with him on it rather than
slap him down reflexively. But it is reasonable for them to object to his use
of his personal account to enable a for-profit project.

~~~
kevingadd
There was a guest access system for looking at class listings that his service
used. It's mentioned in the slides.

------
miles
It is embarrassing to see basic grammatical mistakes in a letter from a
university:

 _Type a 5-6 research paper..._

What is a "5-6" research paper? Even sadder is the officious and petty tone:

 _The paper must be in 12 point font, Times New Roman, double-spaced with one-
inch margins..._

I know what my response would be: two words, one page, 150 pt font.

~~~
gergles
In the spirit of assignment, since they don't specify the kerning, you could
just s u b m i t y o u r .. you get the idea. (HTML is going to eat them, but
pretend like there's a ton of space between each character.)

~~~
MaysonL
Heck, they don't specify the page size, merely the margins.

~~~
jlgreco
Feeding post-it notes through a printer might be difficult though.

~~~
john_flintstone
They said 'type' not 'print.' He could use a manual typewriter.

~~~
iliis
Altough it's rather hard to find one that is writes in Times New.

~~~
jlgreco
You can probably find times new roman typeballs out there for IBM selectrics.

------
cantankerous
I've got a better idea. Transfer. Nobody should tolerate this level of self-
aggrandizement (in the form of "punishment" from anybody, even if they broke
some rules.

The student made the administration of the school look bad/made them
uncomfortable and they're making him pay the price. You don't have to play
their games. Just leave.

~~~
gergles
He can't. The veiled mentions of "holds" on his records prevent him from
transferring, because the University will not release a transcript until he
submits to their punishment. No transcript, no transfer.

~~~
NathanKP
If I were him I wouldn't bother with transferring my transcript. College
education isn't worth a flip if you already know how to code and can
demonstrate it by making a decent app like he did.

I dropped out of college because I made my own app and started getting two job
offers a month from decent startups looking for developers. I'm sure this kid
will be getting job offers from the press coverage of this.

If I were him I wouldn't waste time with school, especially from such a dated
and ignorant institution when he could be getting better real life experience.

Long story short I'd hire him, and if I were him I'd leave that school without
a single backward glance.

~~~
christiangenco
It looks like he outsourced the coding: <http://ucouldfinish.com/conduct/>

Regardless, this is a kid that can get things done.

------
jdbernard
The guy who made this app set up a timeline here:
<http://ucouldfinish.com/conduct/>

Reading his side of the story it seems that the University IT blocked it first
out of fear of being overwhelmed and then the University looked for some way
to make it stick. I understand that charging for the service is the reason
they have officially decided to keep it blocked.

Unless he has misrepresented the facts about how much data his service pulls
it is trivial compared to daily use of the university service. He has invested
significant time and money into creating a much more user-friendly interface
to the course catalog. That is worth the amount he was charging. The problem,
of course, is that he does not own the course listing, and the university has
every right to offer it on their terms.

Better to ask forgiveness than permission the saying goes, but in this case it
seems forgiveness is not forthcoming. Based on the free garage spot counting
app he mentions in the presentation it looks like permission would not have
been granted either. So while the university is within their rights, they do
seem to be contradicting their own value statements.

~~~
gscott
His problem was that he kept on contacting the university forcing their hand.
Once he was blocked, he should have backed off. Probably would have blown
over.

------
dbbolton
It's always bothered me how (even state-funded) universities tend to act as
autonomous legal bodies. It's especially disheartening to see them trample on
the bill of rights (e.g. most universities will have a "policy" that you
basically can't say anything bad about them). If you do break some arbitrary
rule, you can expect an arbitrary punishment for it. When it comes down to it,
they can make you do whatever they want you to until you are no longer a
student.

~~~
bhickey
Your comment hits close.

Some years ago I reported a domestic battery in progress to the Brown
University police. They turned up and refused to arrest the perp even though
state law obliges them to do so. As witness I made a statement to the police
and dean's office. I was then intimidated by a dean for my "black and white
thinking" and he demanded that I mind my own business.

About a year or two later he failed upward to Dartmouth where he is still
employed.

------
SoftwareMaven
I used to work for a student information system company. These systems are all
ancient, designed around a time when a dozen people would connect to the
server using their green screen terminals or, in a spate of massive
innovation, Oracle Forms.

As a result, all of the web access must be done through a single db server.
Any app (including the portal) tends to directly access the db, causing all
sorts of stored procedures to run. Nothing is cached. The server is only busy
twice a year, fall and spring semester registration, so there is a limited
desire to spend more than they _absolutely_ have to on it.

Over all, IT in higher education in an interesting mix. There is a decent
percentage of really good people there, who love the environment and are
willing to give up the salary as a result. Unfortunately, there are also at
least as many people who are earning what they are worth. The less prestigious
the school, the higher the percentage of the latter.

------
mustardhamsters
It glosses over it pretty quickly, but it sounds like he was charging a fee
for frequency of checks for the classes. Part of the slide presentation shows
that the school's policy surrounding their electronic services forbids
commercial use or personal gain. Maybe that's part of the problem.

Edit: The conduct timeline makes this pretty cut and dried:
<http://ucouldfinish.com/conduct/> In the written statement of hearing
determination (July 24, 2pm) they say specifically that he's in violation of
their code by making unauthorized commercial use of their service. They then
go on to talk about server loads, but the primary violation is the
commercialization of their service.

~~~
glimcat
He's also effectively selling preferred access to classes, which is something
of an ethical issue.

And many universities handle waitlisting on a department or class level so
they have leeway to deal with various factors as appropriate. Ever tried to
implement university, departmental, program, and class policies
simultaneously, while keeping them up-to-date, while handling who can override
the computer under what amalgam of policies? No? Well, that's what you'd need
to do in order to get automated waitlisting working at most universities.

The fact that there's not a university-level waitlisting feature isn't an
excuse to hack around policy, especially not while violating ToS and
misappropriating resources for commercial resale.

------
jdietrich
I'm just wondering how such an obviously intelligent and enterprising young
man ends up studying at an institution with only marginally more academic
credibility than Hamburger University.

~~~
jcc80
It's not that uncommon for people this intelligent and enterprising to be
completely bored out of their mind in high school and get mediocre grades.
Prestigious schools, in general, don't accept "the best" but instead accept a
certain type of student/personality.

~~~
_delirium
That's one thing I think is good about the California state system. I know
some very intelligent people who went to community college first and then
transferred to a UC to finish, because they didn't have the high-school grades
to get into a "good" school directly, but the public university system is
designed for that kind of transfer to be possible (there is a specific
transfer process, and in addition the 4-year college degree programs must be
designed so that transferring in is possible, with prereqs fulfillable via
community college courses).

~~~
pessimizer
I'm pretty sure it's like that most places, being a community college -> state
university transfer myself (in Illinois), and knowing plenty of other people
who went from community college to Northwestern and a few other nice private
colleges. Anything out of your degree's core reqs. seems to usually be easy to
transfer from community college, and that's usually what the first 2 years
are. CC is also a good place for knocking out your math requirements, and a
lot of the people in my math classes were traditional university students
doing it to save money, or to get it done during a summer semester at home.

Problems might be more from not having a decent community college to go to,
families that think community college is unacceptable, or just slacker
inertia. I had an excellent community college, and went back to school as an
adult over 10 years after dropping out of high school, so none of that stuff
applied to me.

edit: better explanation at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4338579>

~~~
misspran
I agree. I went to a community college before transferring to the University
of California, San Diego. I had an excellent experience at my CC; smaller
class sizes, dedicated teachers,ect..I felt I got more value out of it than
the big classes at UCSD. Where, like most big universities, the teachers there
were there mostly for research. I did get a lot of shit for it though. A lot
of condescending people who jump to the conclusion that I was unmotivated and
stupid because I went to a CC.

------
revelation
There has always been something wrong with these usage policies. Its a
technical problem, no? If you don't want me to make more than X requests, tell
your webserver to stop answering them. If you can't do that, then what the
hell are you doing operating a webserver on the internet?

~~~
drewinglis
They did successfully block his requests. The issue is that he was charging
for the service, and that was against their policy. That's why he was
disciplined (though I find their response laughable and misguided).

~~~
dthunt
Actually, it doesn't appear to have been against any policy, or it would have
been cited as such.

This is basically what happens when bad administrators are made to look bad
after they over-react to someone providing the community a service that the
university chose not to. They find some flimsy excuse to punish the party they
irrationally blame for their own actions.

------
delinka
Where's the information on this? Was he querying the myUCF dozens of times
every second? Is he accused of bring the networking infrastructure to its
knees?

Or is this simply the faculty attempting to make a student conform? "Watch
this presentation to see our side of the story." What story?

Edit: so we have to click more links on the linked page to get any more
context. My apologies for being lazy.

"University officials, however, said Arnold's software was tying up the campus
computer network, claiming it accessed UCF's scheduling website 220,000 times,
as often as every 60 seconds."

I want to know if the reporter bungled the information or if these officials
are this clueless. If this thing accessed the server "as often as every 60
seconds," where's the problem? Was the student really that clueless that he
wrote his service to query _constantly_?

~~~
slapshot
There appears to be a more extensive PDF archive of hearing docs here:
[http://www.centralfloridafuture.com/polopoly_fs/7.52307!/Hea...](http://www.centralfloridafuture.com/polopoly_fs/7.52307!/Hearing_Documents_2.pdf)

On the last page, an IT administrator testified that the application logged on
every 15 minutes and checked the availability of every UCF course at each
logon, which (according to the administrator) caused a total of around 14
minutes of query processing time.

That seems excessive, but if there are hundreds of courses and each course
takes 15 seconds to check (presumably due to inefficient queries being run on
legacy computer systems) then I could see real lag.

The hearing docs also say that the "YouCanFinish" service was a paid service
and the on-campus IT agreement forbids building paid services on top of campus
resources (in this case, the class registration service, not just the campus
WiFi network). I can think of good arguments to object to a private service
charging students for access to classes; it puts students who can't afford
"YouCanFinish" at a disadvantage in class registration and (if competition
emerges) there's a huge incentive to intentionally lag the registration
servers so that students effectively have to use the private service to get
classes.

Seems like the sort of service where the right path is to work with the
school, not try to privately monetize class selection.

~~~
mintplant
According to the student's slide deck, the service checked only courses users
had signed up for, cached the information, and averaged 814 requests per day.

~~~
delinka
The monetization angle sounds like the only real problem with the entire
situation.

~~~
briandear
However, the University themselves "monetize" every little thing. Lab fees for
English classes, library fees, $20 transcript fees to print a document on a
$0.25 piece of paper. Fees for registration, fees for athletics (even if you
don't participate,) fees for the Student Health Center (even if you have
private insurance) fees for everything.

This kid making some coin isn't a problem for me. He built a service, he
should get paid. He accessed public data (apparently) and didn't crack into
anything.

The real question is why are universities so bad with their money -- they can
pay head football coaches million dollar contracts, yet most universities are
chronically unable to offer enough sections of popular classes. I get it,
football brings in revenue, but so does licensing technology innovations and
alumni that strike it rich.

Higher education is important, but the industry of higher ed is a giant scam.

~~~
jarofgreen
One parties shit behavior does not justify anothers.

Education is meant to be about more than free-market principles of making as
much money as you can and screw who you hurt on the way. A system where people
who pay more get a better shot at classes is unfair.

Tho I agree the uni's response is an over-reaction and wrong. The real problem
here is the situation the uni set up and not the student's actions. But for
me, I couldn't 100% support this student unless it was free.

~~~
jamesaguilar
A dollar isn't exactly a lot to ask in compensation for what seems like some
significant effort.

------
ontoillogical
I love the part in the slide deck where he digs up a quote from the
university's VP of IT talking up PeopleSoft's reliability.

“According to Joel Hartman, Vice Provost for Information Technologies and
Resources at UCF, Sun really delivers in all regards. The Sun infrastructure
for Oracle’s PeopleSoft applications at UCF provides outstanding reliability,
investment protection, and performance”

\- Joel, the initiator of this conduct case, stating how powerful the myUCF
server network is in a technical brief for universities published by Sun
Microsystems."

------
Shenglong
University policy like this isn't uncommon. Last semester, the campus police
called me in and told me I was to receive a letter of warning for "bad
behavior". When I asked what I did, they told me "we can't tell you because we
need to protect privacy".

On an IT related incident, my school's IT department claimed that doubling the
email inbox for every student (25mb to 50mb) would cost 4 million dollars.

Schools are terrible, and there's no solution in sight. Every university
campus is like a mini dictatorship.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I know an undergrad the recently wrote a forkbomb on a programming Web server.
The student thought he was a big time hacker and quickly sent out emails to
faculty telling them how great he was and how nice it was for him to let them
know about this problem.

Well, no one was very pleased with this, in fact, the issue was well known and
the policy was for students to just not be jerks. The student was disciplined,
but nothing even remotely close to how ridiculous this student at UCF was
treated and this student here did nothing malicious, in fact, tried to provide
a productive service.

------
comex
I wonder if some of the fear here is caused by the fact that this kind of tool
would tend to get its users into classes first, before users that manually
checked the original website on a regular basis... which seems unfair,
especially since it has a (nominal) fee, and it removes the vague link between
enthusiasm and ability to get in that manual checking entails.

But perhaps that's better stated as that the tool exposes the fundamental
brokenness and unfairness of a system that allocates limited space based on
who presses the refresh button at the right time.

~~~
briandear
A nominal fee unfair? The "lab" fee for an ENGLISH class could pay that fee 20
times over. Colleges and university costs have risen faster than nearly every
other "industry" -- including healthcare. I wouldn't say a nominal fee was
unfair, not when a textbook can cost $150. What's unfair is a state university
paying jackass administrators 6 figure salaries, yet it takes a kid to create
a notification system that actually works. What the heck are all those IT
administrators actually doing with their day? One would think class
registration would be single most important IT task of a university. After
all, if students aren't in classes, what's the point?

~~~
jarofgreen
One unfair situation does not justify another.

------
csense
The administration's reaction is clearly politically motivated. They're
basically trying to hide their own incompetence in having a crap system.

It's incredibly stupid and frustrating for anyone who has an ounce of common
sense, or cares about technology.

Hopefully this generates enough negative publicity to change the
administration's point of view, because frankly, political pressure is the
only kind of argument that toxic bureaucracies understand.

~~~
barake
I doubt anyone is trying to cover up making a poor choice of SIS vendor. It is
astonishing how absolutely terrible higher ed software offerings are.

That being said, the punishments are stupid. Cut off his app's access if
charging money is a policy violation.

------
jjcm
It's a shame that the University punished him for helping out students, though
it certainly may have hammered the class registration servers as a side
effect. Either way though, this is going to get a lot of publicity for a guy
who's undoubtedly talented and motivated. Considering the effort he put in to
both this and the parking app, it looks like the guy would have little
difficulty getting a job in the Bay Area or other startup havens, even sans-
degree. At this point, I'd probably leave the university if I were him.
Employers will accept him with open arms.

------
farhanpatel
I built an iOS app for my school (Simon Fraser University) that allowed
students to view/share their schedule with their friends. One of the most
frequent questions I get is if the school has tried to shut me down and it is
exactly for reasons like this that other students don't build more apps like
this.

We have the same student system that UCF uses. It's horrible and slow. Tools
like this make it a little bit more manageable.

I am surprised more schools dont have simple API's that allow students to
build services on top of them.

~~~
mgkimsal
You shouldn't be surprised at all. The schools don't build these things - they
buy generally large-scale systems that claim to do X things, but mainly
perform a smaller percentage of X things competently, leaving other features
slow/broken. But with only a relatively small handful of customers out there,
and a generally long sales cycle, its primarily larger vendors who can engage
with customers like universities, and smaller companies which are able to
provide innovative functionality often don't get to market.

I've built a registration system for a moderately large school district - it
handles about 20,000 students per semester, and while it's certainly not
_simple_ to handle everything that's needed, it's not that hard to make
something perform decently enough. At peak, we have hundreds of people
checking or making enrollments concurrently, which always involves doing
waitlist checking (and, IIRC, different waitlist policies apply to different
student types and courses). All of this is standard HTML interface - if we
were to build an API to serve up just raw JSON, the load would likely be a bit
less.

Back to the surprise - schools are mostly just businesses - they generally
outsource their foodservice too - it'd be great if there was a lot more home
cooking on most campuses, but they're often overrun with processed foods. Same
thing with a lot of software infrastructure - it's outsourced/off-the-shelf
stuff vs stuff built with on-campus skills. Faculty/staff/students developing
more campus/school-related stuff could be a game changer, no? Is the idea that
most of those students won't be there in 2-4 years a big hindrance to this
approach?

~~~
verisimilidude
"Is the idea that most of those students won't be there in 2-4 years a big
hindrance to this approach?"

Yes. That's always the excuse in my experience, even when it doesn't make any
sense. At my previous university job, my department used an ancient—and I
really mean _ancient_ —shopping cart system. This thing had been written in
ColdFusion during the mid-90s and they were still running it in 2009. It
required all kinds of hand-holding and manual labor that should've otherwise
been automated. Even though the original (outsourced) developer had long since
disappeared, management refused to consider a new shopping cart. Why?

"Because we can't risk losing the person who sets it up."

There are no words. I chalk up the attitude to extreme, unhealthy risk-
aversion.

~~~
mgkimsal
I wish more people were required to take a logic course before getting to work
at a university.

They've _already lost_ the person who set it up - there's zero "risk" involved
- it already happened. The world didn't end. But life is painful for many
people because of the current system.

"Unhealthy" is an understatement.

------
Xcelerate
I actually wrote a tool to do this very same thing at my own university.
Worked great and got me the classes I wanted as soon as they became available.
I only shared the service with a few people though because I knew the
administration would do something like this if I made it public. It's wrong,
but it wouldn't have been worth my time to deal with.

------
martinshen
I was actually just talking with a buddy about how even schools that promote
entrepreneurship (with possibly the exception of Stanford) so constantly
stifle and work against entrepreneurs.

~~~
tikhonj
At Berkeley, couple of students built a web app for generating schedules
automatically (Ninja Courses[1]). Now, this isn't entirely analogous to this
app: they didn't charge students for using the program and it only plans your
schedule; you have to actually register yourself. However, it does access very
similar information like how full classes and sections are.

Instead of shutting them down, the university licensed the technology and now
provide a Berkeley-branded version [2].

[1]: <http://ninjacourses.com> [2]: <http://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu>

~~~
killerswan
A similar thing was done at Iowa State when I was there.

------
jrockway
_6 page research paper on why maintaining a system like myUCF is difficult_

"Maintaining a system like myUCF is difficult because caching is hard, so
let's go shopping. Furthermore, lorem ipsum dolor sit amit. (6 more pages) In
conclusion, I'm very sorry your publicly-available program runs so slowly.
Although I don't have a degree, I would happily repair it for $500,000."

They never said it had to be good.

(Incidentally, University IT policies tend to be quite silly. I stopped
attending school after they wanted me to sign something giving the
administrators the right to search my off-campus apartment for any reason.
Ended up saving me quite a bit of money...)

------
thinkbohemian
Is there a contact number or email address where we can speak to the people in
charge at the university? Even if it doesn't change the punishment, they
should be aware of how they are portraying their institution.

~~~
AJ007
<http://president.ucf.edu/ContactUs.asp> <http://provost.ucf.edu/contact-us/>

A little more work to track these guys down, but doable with some searches:
<http://bot.ucf.edu/>

Since its a state university, for those that are Florida residents:
<http://www.flgov.com/contact-gov-scott/>
[http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Representatives/detai...](http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Representatives/details.aspx?memberid=4357)
[http://myfloridahouse.com/Sections/Representatives/details.a...](http://myfloridahouse.com/Sections/Representatives/details.aspx?MemberId=3041&SessionId=64)
<http://www.flsenate.gov/Senators/s26>

------
xtc
I'll be starting my Freshman year at UCF in the Fall. I would have loved to
use this as compared to myUCF when waiting for my preferred Calc I class to
open up. It was a hassle even to just check it every time, and I was never
given a clear answer half the time.

------
brudgers
For those unfamiliar with the University of Central Florida, the site's name
"You Could Finish" is not accidental.

"UCF" has long been said to stand for "You Can't Finish" since at least the
early 1980's (i.e. shortly after the name change from FTU).

<http://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can%27t+finish%22+UCF>

------
farmdawgnation
This is a complete joke. Ok, so it's legit that they are mad that he was
monetizing it. That's fine. Why do they have to humiliate and sanction him?
Block access to the service and tell him not to do it again. Are we really
still in the dark ages where we decide to make examples of people for
infractions like this?

------
Turing_Machine
I think the guy needs to contact F.I.R.E. <http://thefire.org/>

------
csense
I suppose you could say that this sort of thing serves as a nice "education"
in how the real world works sometimes.

I personally like to keep all my online work disconnected from my real-life
identity.

If he'd written this app anonymously, since it only uses guest logins, the
university would have no idea who wrote it. They might disable the guest
access, but they couldn't have punished him personally.

Unless they were willing to commit to a lawsuit and managed to convince a
judge to allow a subpoena of the app's financial records...

~~~
dasil003
> _I suppose you could say that this sort of thing serves as a nice
> "education" in how the real world works sometimes._

Yep. You can't make the University look incompetent and drag them through the
mud and expect to win in the process. These institutions wield to tremendous
power, and if you are dead set on exposing their flaws they will fight you to
the death and you will lose.

Now, as a poor student, you can definitely do asymmetric damage. You could
blitz them by dropping out of school with an open letter, going to startup
school, and hiring the shit out of their brightest students.

That would be a calculated move though. It shouldn't be done out of emotion.
If you actually want your college degree, it's better to make peace sooner
than later. It sounds like this would have been possible well before the
sanctions if the OA had swallowed his pride. You really don't need to prove
anything to these bureaucrats, just look out for yourself, that's the larger
lesson.

------
chrisrxth
You deserve a scholarship.

Plus, you are obviously smart and capable enough to be fine if you didn't
finish your degree. Better yet, as cantankerous mentioned, transfer.

------
KMBredt
I like it that according to <https://my.ucf.edu/> their motto is "Stands for
Opportunity".

------
sturmeh
Meanwhile at UNSW: <http://mahler.cse.unsw.edu.au/rectangles/>

------
pixelcort
This is ironic, as IIRC the computer science department at my alma mater
(SJSU) had the creation of a class schedule finder as a requirement for all
students in one of their core classes.

To think that another school would discipline one of their students for
something that another school requires of some of their students is quite
interesting.

------
kreutz
I built one of these a couple years back as well. (I was going to be abroad
and wasn't going to have internet.) I knew it had marketability. Glad to see
someone come through with this! Bummer the school was so anal about it though.

------
AutoCorrect
The University idiot that sanctioned him should have to write a 12 page
research paper on why it would have been better to buy this guy out and fold
his product into the University website, so it could serve it's STUDENTS
better!

~~~
christiangenco
That would be impossible; their software is leased from PeopleSoft - a
monolithic company that charges the university an outrageous annual fee for
the license to run it on University servers.

------
gonzo
I wrote one of these for the course catalog at UH (Hawaii). Nobody cared.

------
yycom
What's the story?

------
tkahn6
I wrote a similar thing for Virginia Tech for private use. I definitely
considered monetizing it but in the end I didn't.

Good luck.

But I think you're going about this all wrong. If you actually wanted to
resolve this situation, you should have requested a meeting with the
university provost or president and explained your service one-on-one -- with
humility. I doubt they were trying to screw you over 'just because'.

It's probably already to late to do this though since you've gone to the media
and have made it a big public issue. There's almost no chance that the
administration is going to make any concession. The terms of service are
written so vaguely they can do whatever they want.

------
rprasad
The hacker rage is misplaced. _The student is in the wrong_. This is not a
story of a bureaucracy run amok; this is a story of a student exploiting a
university computer system and causing technical problems with their back end.

TL;DR: student creates a for-profit registration system that abusively scrapes
the university's registration system, causing system slowdowns and preventing
students who are not using the app from registering for classes. University
policy bars any _for profit_ applications from using the University's computer
systems.

