Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith.
They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter.
Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
I really love UW and have had a wonderful time here. But this is so demoralizing.
Update #2:
I appreciate you guys for all of your advice.
This platform was never intended to be monetized, and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
I'm not planning to pursue this project at this point. If they came up to me at first with the offer to work with them it might be different, but the way they handled it makes me just want to walk away.
> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
All evidence so far indicates they will not make it right, but instead they may make it even worse. Your faith is wildly misplaced. Seriously, talk to a lawyer.
Keep in mind, just because you seek advice from a lawyer doesn't mean you need to take legal action against the school. Talking to a lawyer is not an escalation; the school doesn't even need to know you consulted one. A lawyer will advise whether you should take legal action and any more amicable alternatives available before they do anything on your behalf.
Just piling on here because upvotes are not visible. The one thing you can guarantee is that your good faith is not reciprocated by the university. Get a lawyer.
To make it easier: it sounds like you're still registered. University of Washington offers Student Legal Services ( https://depts.washington.edu/slsuw/ ). Set up a referral with one of them and talk to them. Even if they're employees of the university and don't want to work with you to sue the university itself they may be able to give you good advice about how to proceed.
Upvoting too.
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
Wow. Literally blackmailing a student to do illegal work (at least would be categorized like that in my country). A student that already paid money for class and potentially a degree the univ is trying to block, mind blowing. OP, 1000% lawyer up.
Relying on good faith won't help you at all.
Someone at the uni has taken this personally, and has attacked you. At this point, if you don't defend yourself - that person has won.
Please seek legal advice.
Their response on face value doesn't make sense. But if I had to guess, you inadvertently made someone in the registrar's office look bad. They probably had to answer to "why didn't you think of this?" If that is the case then it makes a lot more sense and is retaliatory behavior. You can't undo their insecurity and loss of face. Therefore you should not expect a reasonable response.
Act accordingly.
Educate yourself on your options. This is why people are recommending a consultation with a lawyer.
Reach out to your friends and contacts in the University. Leverage existing ones to make new ones. Others may be in a stronger position to put pressure on the registrar's office.
Use the news and media to further ratchet up pressure.
Stay positive. Fon't stoop to their level, it won't help you.
And if you have to walk away it won't hurt you too much in the long term. After about 5 years in industry nearly all companies stop caring about credentials. Just get your foot in the door somewhere and shine, that's what I did and it worked out for me 26 years later.
Hang in there.
Seconding this. It's entirely likely the registrar is this petty and boneheaded. It's less likely that their boss is though, this is a really bad look for the university.
Personally I would find a way to contact the president of the university (possibly through university PR, who also care about public image) and simply state,
"The registrar is asking me for quid pro quo, that I develop software for them in exchange to restore my ability to register for classes."
and include a screenshot of that communication.
Additionally, consider "agreeing" to their demands, if they will unblock you immediately. Register for classes, then reneg on your half of the "deal". Even if they then retaliate, that strengthens your position (a) that they are engaging in quid pro quo, and (b) that there's no valid reason that you should be barred from registering for courses, and also buys you some time.
A +1 to everyone else who has said get a lawyer.
I'll add another angle: financial.
You have invested years of time and presumably thousands of dollars into your schooling. Their threat that they will not allow you to graduate unless you give them unpaid labor without a clear boundary condition is a threat. While I haven't seen the correspondence, from what you said it appears they're doing the moral equivalent of one of those sitcom situations where someone is compelled to do what the other person wants under a threat, and even when they've done it, the threatening person keeps the threat.
A good lawyer (and not all lawyers are good) will help you understand your rights and your position.
As others have said, this is not an escalation of aggression, and not only don't you have to tell them whether you've seen a lawyer, unless the lawyer is speaking on your behalf- you don't have to tell them anything, and you shouldn't tell them, or tell us (in case they read this, which they likely will).
A lawyer in this case is more of a scholarly resource, telling you what your options are.
Agreed.
To add to that: it is understandable to expect and hope for the other party to behave rationally. But there is a power imbalance that the other party is exploiting and for all we know intends to continue.
> reneg on your half of the "deal".
deny, delay, defect.
and don't sign anything!!
> and don't sign anything!!
This. If asked to sign anything, say that you have to check with your attorney first.
> But if I had to guess, you inadvertently made someone in the registrar's office look bad. They probably had to answer to "why didn't you think of this?
That was my initial thought too. The upside is that that "someone" likely has a boss who called them out - so there may well be levels of the hierarchy that won't lose face by backing out of the exclusion decision. The challenge is to get their attention.
The problem is that their leadership may not care. Bureaucrats at higher education don't take the job because they're good at it. They take it because they're not and want a job with high job security. The poor pay and unrewarding tasks are acceptable to them as a means to coast. Couple that with a job that can be quite stressful at times, students can be very demanding, and you have a recipe for entrenched apathy. I base my assessment on my time working for a University for 8 years.
The registrar's office are the wrong people to appeal to. The deans office can fix this, but they may only move if it makes the University look bad. That's where the news and media can help, but this guy likely needs help to make that happen effectively.
Yeah, let me give some perspective here.
There's somebody in the registrar's office whose job is to be responsible for the production process of registration. They are minimally staffed and given just enough resources to run that process. Likely at some point their leadership told them they had to make an API so that they could integrate with other systems. Due to poor funding and lack of skills, just doing that is a full time/major job.
Then some student comes along and says "hey look if I scrape this API, I can make an app that helps users! That's what APIs are for, right!?" The student is likely quite smart and probably built something that is useful.
But students aren't full time software engineers. They lack knowledge and context about how to build production systems that handle the load during the registration crush and also don't cause undue load on the backend API servers.
So when the dean comes to the head of IT for Registration, and says "wait, this student just did something that you were supposed to do, and it looked really easy", you just made the IT person's life much harder but didn't actually necessarily solve the problem. Now the IT person has to defend what they have done, while looking bad... and is not getting any further resources to fix the issue.
I think this is a variant of the "why don't you just..." and chesterton's fence. That is, if you're inexperienced, it's often easy to come up with a naive solution without understanding the context, that kind of works but that actually makes things overall worse. For example, what if your app crashed the registration backends during the middle of registration. Are you, the clever student, on call during registration (24/7) for your app, and in contact with the folks who run the registration backends?
It's easy to criticize the IT folks at Colleges but they are not resourced to handle things like this.
> They lack knowledge and context about how to build production systems that handle the load during the registration crush and also don't cause undue load on the backend API servers.
That sounds like a cop-out. Sure, students may not know about all this, but they're also not building Google. Many people run businesses without caring about such things just fine. Most things don't require six nines of reliability and people don't expect them to be this reliable. Students in particular are used to university systems being constantly down, or resource-starved to the point of uselessness for no good reason.
> it's often easy to come up with a naive solution without understanding the context, that kind of works but that actually makes things overall worse. For example, what if your app crashed the registration backends during the middle of registration. Are you, the clever student, on call during registration (24/7) for your app, and in contact with the folks who run the registration backends?
It's hard to come up with a solution that's worse than what you get at universities for this stuff, which usually is nothing at all - and even if it is something, there's no one on call to help the student anyway.
I got their code to run and it's not good. It's unusable as is and could be created from scratch in a better way in a day. It lacks all integrations with the University API, that part was never written.
The existing matching of swap requests is poorly done and requires much further work.
There's nothing of value here that OP had to scuttle.
Yes, but as we know, the best way to make a project that is late/slow/unreliable even later, slower, and more unreliable is to add inexperienced devs to the project. Which is (from the perspective of the university) what they are trying to avoid.
well except they allegedly asked said allegedly inexperienced developer to develop the thing for them, for free
Yes, I think this post has established that whomever created the response to the original ToS violation (rather, just a plan to violate the ToS) wasn't being very thoughtful (assuming everything is being described correctly). I would assume that at this point, the discussion has been moved above the original employee who responded and is being dealt with at the dean level (with the goal to be avoiding UW appearing in a bad light in the press).
I've seen hundreds of "administration outrage" articles and I guess I've kind of learned that the backstory is usually more complicated, nuanced, and reasonable than the original poster implied. But the internet mobs proceed anyway.
You write as if you've had some experience .... Still, the IT team should have reached out to the student - it's a university and they especially should be good and dealing with inexperienced, well-meaning students - and straightened it out: Hey, this is a great idea; it will also need this and this and something like this to work with these other systems and handle the load on registration day.
It's really noteworthy that other students have the opportunity to engage in this and other projects as part of their curriculum. They can gain valuable experience while also contributing to the college community. It's disheartening that this situation has led to such drastic measures, impacting students' futures. It seems like there could have been more thoughtful ways to address this on the college's part.
I am not sure I consider the university's production registration system as a useful project for students to contribute to. Those are systems that are the responsbility of the university administration, not the educational mission of the university.
Yes, the university was drastic; if I were the person responsible, I wouldn't have started with a terms of service violation and putting registration on hold; I'd write a nice thank you note with some encouragement, along with a direct request to hold off running the application until the next registration season, and a calendar entry to discuss this in person/off the written record to explain the more subtle aspects associated with developing production applications in a university environment.
> Yeah, let me give some perspective here.
This is spot on and way more likely than my contrived example. The point holds this is political as all things are in University environments.
Another interesting observation I made from my time working at a University is that it was one of the most toxic and political work environments I've ever had the displeasure to work in.
> And if you have to walk away it won't hurt you too much in the long term. After about 5 years in industry nearly all companies stop caring about credentials.
That is very wrong, in my experience. Many jobs require college degrees; much status in life requires college degrees. I know people who are smart, successful, and eternally embarrassed when that comes up.
Also, you did the work, you deserve the degree - a college education is a real, valuable thing. Don't let the current anti-intellectual, anti-institutional, anti-liberal trendiness distract you. The trends pass, and decades from now you'll still have a degree and the truths of knowledge will remain.
Certainly jobs will say they require a college degree.
I have three and a half years of a five year degree in computer engineering. My current job as a VP of Engineering "requires" a degree. The language in the job description is very clear.
Guess what? That's always negotiable with enough experience.
If you can talk intelligently about your subject matter in depth and you can demonstrate a history of that, then you're fine.
A degree doesn't magically make you a gifted programmer. It merely shows you where to start. You still need a lifetime of self guided continual education to be really successful in your career.
I think where it hurt me most was early in my career where I likely earned less than I would have with a degree.
This will likely become harder to do with time as computer science and hardware slow their ever changing advancement and become more established.
By all means get the degree if you can. But you can still over come not having one with enough self study and being strategic about which jobs you take.
> That is very wrong, in my experience
It's right in my experience, but I'm also aware that its 2025, not 2007 when I got away with this.
It’s a funny thought, but looks like a nonstarter:
> SLS cannot represent a student when the opposing party is another UW-Seattle, Tacoma, or Bothell student or UW entity.
I know very little about lawyering, but I could imagine a UW-alum or Seattle-area lawyer advising pro bono bc of generosity or good publicity on a very newsworthy case
Anyone on here friends with a UW-alum or Seattle-area lawyer who might be interested but doesn’t read HN?
Do American university students belong to unions?
It's very common in the UK. The most visible part of the unions is running social activities, often bars and events, but they can also provide legal advice to their members.
Not undergraduates. The "student union" in this context is 100% a social entity.
Graduate students sometimes are part of unions, but usually only if they're also employed by the university (somebody paying full tuition for an MBA probably isn't in a union, but a doctoral student teaching or doing research might be).
Undergrads doing part-time work at the university to pay bills (dining hall, bookstore, etc) could be, in theory, but probably aren't.
Even if this student isn't a member, the local graduate student union (https://www.uaw4121.org/) would probably be a useful ally. All TAs are in the bargaining unit, and UW CSE has _a lot_ of undergrad TAs, so I wouldn't even be surprised if this student is a present (or former) member.
Graduate students (who teach, do research, and some administrative tasks for the university) occasionally do. What American schools usually have is a “student government” which is approximately 90% roleplaying as elected officials, and the remaining 10% is deciding which banquets they should host themselves to spend the small budget the university gives them.
They can have a conversation without being representation and should connect OP to someone who can represent them.
No they can't have a conversation when they know of a non waivable conflict.
Surely they could refer the enquiry to the bar association or something in this jurisdiction.
How would the lawyer even know, without conversation, that there was a conflict?
> Surely they could refer the enquiry to the bar association or something in this jurisdiction.
They might but in many cases wouldn't even do that because they still wouldn't get paid for it. Doesn't matter, you don't need them for that.
An example of the difference between being independent vs third party.
Who mostly pays them sets the rules.
The entity paying the lawyers isn’t making the rules here. This is professional ethics: the attorneys in question have a conflict of interest.
> University of Washington offers Student Legal Services ( https://depts.washington.edu/slsuw/ ).
Do not talk to them. They report to the same people who are persecuting you. Find another attorney - ask someone local for references, maybe a student from the area could ask their parents.
Joining the dogpile to get a lawyer. Your degree is at stake, and this isn't the sort of issue that will burn up your money if you don't want it to. Go in for a consultation and see what they think. Bring all correspondence. Worst case scenario you pay him for a few hours after he has some answers for you.
An attorney kept me from making some very expensive (honest) mistakes and payed for himself many times over. Don't gamble with your future.
Also worth noting that it would be incredibly naive to expect good faith to be reciprocated by any institution at all throughout the course of one's life, which sounds cynical, but lets be real. If there's a way that almost any institution or person that you're transacting with in good faith—including schools, workplaces, lawyers, medical professionals, the leader of your country, sometimes family, whatever—can get away with fucking you over, they might. Not always, but expect it. Which reminds me, I need to pester a doctor about a web design invoice.
> If there's a way that almost any institution or person that you're transacting with in good faith [...] can get away with fucking you over, they might. Not always, but expect it.
This. Always protect yourself, even when operating in good faith. You may only interact with someone professionally, but you never know what kind of person you are really working with. Sometimes people may seem nice, but are pure evil.
In this particular case, it is likely the people in charge are completely unaware of the people doing the blackmailing. This may even be criminal, so it might be worth just talking to the police.
> You may only interact with someone professionally, but you never know what kind of person you are really working with. Sometimes people may seem nice, but are pure evil.
It's not even always a case of being evil. Large institutions/companies are full of polices and processes designed to protect the system at all costs and some nice people will turn their brain off and strictly follow those policies either because they feel they have to, because it's the easiest thing to do, or because they know that as long as they stick to the policies (or what they think the policies are) they'll be safe.
Absolutely. It's my impression—after many mistakes—that one of the most important pieces of advice I could have given myself at a younger age, is that "your job is basically a function of what you're empowered to do and what you're clearly rewarded for, don't imagine it to be something it's not, don't pretend or act as though you have more influence than you do".
Your bank's website might have shit accessibility and usability, but it's not because the developers suck, it's because they aren't paid to do more than the minimum that they're paid for, and it's stupid for them to incur that cost or scope risk just because they're altruistic. If they spent 5 hours on a Wednesday optimizing a thing for screen readers, but there's literally no measurable reason to do so, that's a mark against them if there's anything else to do that does.
The same pattern is true across other jobs. It's not the admin's job to have empathy or to decide whether a policy should exist, it's there job to enforce arbitrary policies. It's also not the job of a University to educate people, that's now a University typically makes money, it's only even tenuously their job to get people between having no measure of knowledge, and having a measure of knowledge, but not necessarily to have any specific impact on that.
To add to that, always know your rights and responsibilities. Don't let anyone walk on your rights and make sure you do at least what you are supposed to do. From moving to a different country, people will prey on you so fast if they realize you don't know your rights (rental rights are soooo much different here than in the US, for example, and they will literally prey on your fear of being evicted). In essence, knowing what you CAN do and MUST do can make all the difference in the world.
Yep, they'll walk all over whoever they can, until they receive just enough bad publicity or pushback, and suddenly it's not an issue anymore.
Student legal services usually can't help you with disputes with the uni -- I remember reading this when speaking to them about a (unfair IMO) traffic ticket when I was a student at a different institution.
cosign, this story is outrageous, it is Lawyer Time, Now. The university is completely out of line and this has all the makings of a disastrous outcome the way they are operating
Unlike most of the other commenters I have personal experience fighting a college administration in court. It was a massive time waste and I came out losing a years of my academic career where they lost nothing (money is absolutely not a factor for a large university, nor is stalling court proceedings to waste your life). I'm not even allowed to elaborate deeply on what it was about, the settlement for putting it behind me was a binding NDA.
This isn't advice it's just a story about what happened to me, to give you an idea of how things *could* go for you:
What I did to warrant initial sanctioning by my college was filing a witness statement describing a petty disorderly offense another student did. Apparently the college didn't like that I filed a statement with the police and it did not go through their internal system. The school placed a hold and I contacted my dean by email. I was told by the dean, in writing, that I was not being sanctioned but the hold would remain until I attended a hearing to describe the incident as prescribed in the handbook. When I went to this 'procedural hearing' with the other witness, they brought us in one at a time in front of representatives of the student body and the administration. At the end of my account they told me I would receive their decision and sanctions by mail. They issued formal academic sanctions and created a remediation plan not unlike what they are requesting of you.
I retained a lawyer at this point and ended up filing a complaint in civil. There's nothing speedy here, judges stalled, the school stalled. Almost 2 years went by and we finally had the lawyers draft a settlement that made it possible to pursue college again. In the meanwhile they increased the sanctions on the remaining witness that didn't sue in order to retaliate. The student we filed the statement about, apparently the school couldn't touch since the police charged him. He got off paying a ticket and no other sanctions, last I heard he was in postgrad for mathematics and doing well for himself.
Unlike most of hte other commentators I also have personal experience fighting a college administration -- and winning. By threatening lawyers, too.
I got into an Honors Study Abroad thing through the school, but was worried about an incomplete grade screwing up my GPA or causing issues. Emailed the admin about it + study abroad office -- they said all good, it's kosher.
Turns out it wasn't, and after dropping 41k to lock in housing and study abroad they told me I couldn't go because I couldn't transfer credits. Well here is a lesson in "keep your emails" cuz I dug that out and picked a fight with the administration.
They eventually gave me all of my money back minus the $600 non-refundable deposit. I was ready to go to the mat for that, too, but they offered to get me a guaranteed slot for on campus housing and permanent first crack at class selection similar to athletes and disabled students. I was sick of commuting by that point and took the offer. I figured out it was a way to get more money out of me pretty quickly -- solve an issue and make money via housing -- but my RA in the on-campus apartments was super cool and basically let me and a roommate squat for multiple summers. Still friends with a lot of those folks I met living on campus too.
Worked out okay, all things considered. Lawyers won't be a guaranteed win, but don't assume that just giving up is a better deal.
Thanks for speaking up. The internet talks about getting a lawyer like it’s a magic (and free) button you press to resolve a situation.
It’s not, and in some cases it can turn your problem into a more expensive and protracted different problem if you’re not careful.
I’d be especially cautious around a University that has already proven itself to have bureaucratic people who will turn small issues into threats of expulsion. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have legal counsel who is equally overstaffed and itching for something to do.
It is usually free and kind of magical to talk to a lawyer, though.
"You can beat the rap, but not the ride".
I am still dealing with a case with a 3 letter agency, going on 6 years now. "Bureaucratic violence" is a thing.
That's a mafia with extra steps
Welcome to the US justice system
Wow this sounds like extortion to me.. I mean not just from the school, but also in the court system. I don't really understand Academia much or if this would effect a person attending another collage, but with something like this, I would drop out of college entirely and take the self-teaching route or online education. I'm not going to allow myself to be subjected to an abusive educational and court system.
I didn't have it quite as bad as you, but I did go to war once with my alma mater regarding a particularly small lab director and part-time instructor who had a Napoleon complex going on. He was directly and obviously infringing on student's First Amendment rights, not to mention bullying the class as a whole and attempting to threaten people. Ironically, his heart was in the right place, but his execution was way off.
I was fortunate in that I went to college much later in life, after a career in the military, and as I'd had enough bullshit there, I made the conscious choice not to tolerate any out in the world.
Long story short, he and I butt heads. Then he wanted to take up to the Department head. For someone with a Ph.D., she definitely didn't think it through, just proving you can have a Ph.D., even in a STEM field, and not be too fucking bright... but... when it got to the Dean of Students, and the campus's VA liaison all sat down for a meeting with me, and I started pointing out that F.I.R.E. would have a field day with this, and would we really want a veteran-led incident on campus with a lab director that's flat out admitted in recorded interviews (I was attending college in a one-party recording state, so I had recordings of every one of these meetings) that he doesn't care about students' First Amendment rights??
That put everything into perspective really damn quick. I have never forgot that meeting because there, in that moment, we all looked at each other and everyone understood exactly what I was saying. The Dean of Students stood up and said, "Do you want to apologize to the department dean...?" and I just raised one eyebrow and he immediately shot back, "Right... we should probably all let this go." I nodded and said, "I think that'd be the best option for everyone involved, after you guys sit down with Lab Director and straighten him out."
I've done some things I'm not too particularly proud of in my life, but this was one time I really felt like I did the right thing.
Funnily enough, today I am I am (re)starting my post secondary education after a decade and counting in the military.
Your comment reminds me of one of the misconceptions that friends have of me/military. I am not as it happens a particularly good shot/fighter/camper/adventurer. However the military has more then prepared me to wade through a bureaucratic swamp to tell a room full of people paid more then me that they're wrong and will fight to the proverbial death over it.
That being said, other then some culture shock, not expecting anything too dramatic, ought to be a good time really.
The First Amendement limits what the US Congress/government can do, not what a private person can do.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
If parent went to a state school, that is the government. If he went to a private school, FIRE goes after them for violating their own contracts that often mirror 1A language.
That's a wild oversimplification, it of course applies to state and local governments as well and has for a long time. A public university is a state entity.
Please familiarize yourself with the various ways higher education comes under the umbrella of “state actor.”
If your college or university accepts money from the government, in public spaces on that campus, like say... anywhere outdoors, for instance, out on the quad, where this happened, that is considered a protected area for speech.
I'm always curious in cases like these what the actual exercise of your "first amendment rights" was that the other person took offense to.
Made fun of a post-doc lab instructor that was under the lab director's purview.
I shit you not. He got upset that someone was - verbally - making fun of this guy. He was a goofy as fuck guy, so I see why 18-22 year olds would do that. I wouldn't because he was a good guy with a good heart, he just looked goofy, acted goofy, and plain old WAS goofy, but that's not enough for me to make fun of someone.
It is enough, actually, but I would never do it maliciously, and I would always do it to someone's face, and it would always... always be good-natured, not intentionally cruel.
Agreed. You need a lawyer. Not necessarily to go to court, but at least to write some letters. That should not cost more than a few hundred dollars. Don't wait.
Document everything. Make copies. Store them somewhere safe.
Read Washington State law on extortion in the first degree.[1] Follow the link to the definition of "threat", especially the section on "official action": "To take wrongful action as an official against anyone or anything, or wrongfully withhold official action, or cause such action or withholding". It's really bad for a state official to attempt extortion. It's a 10 years in prison felony offense.
Edit: Having a lawyer write and send a letter on your behalf tends to resolve a large number of annoying situations. A lawyer on the other side will have to read it. This immediately gets you past the first-line people to people who have to consider consequences.
Also, merely them knowing you have a lawyer instantly reframes the problem in their eyes. The path of least resistance to dealing with a "problematic" student is making the student go away. The path of least resistance to dealing with a "problematic" student with a lawyer is making the lawyer go away.
All of a sudden bureaucrats will be getting visits from internal legal departments asking very pointed questions about questionable actions.
Yes and.
Yes, and even if it doesn't go to court, the university will know that it will cost them time and money.
It's entirely possible that university president or higher administration is unaware of the situation, and if they were, will intervene. The best way to do that is to have it brought to their attention via a legal letter, which then means they need to bring in their lawyers.
A good lawyer for the university won't want to fight because fighting is not in the best interest of the university. A good lawyer will say "We threatened the student with this? No good can come of that... let him register, let him graduate and make this all go away."
That doesn't mean the client (the university) will take it, but overall fighting isn't in their interest either.
A lawyer is NOT the right next step. As soon as you engage a lawyer the school will switch from treating this as a student policy matter (which will be resolved in a timeline of days) to a legal matter (which will only be resolved in a timeline of years). The timeline question is of no concern to the courts or the school but makes a huge difference to you.
It does seem like you need someone on your side. A list of people to consider: your academic advisor, the professor in whose course you built the prototype application, your department chair, student ombudsman, dean of students. If the university is being as unreasonable as your posting makes it sound like, you will have no trouble getting one or more of these people on your side and they will be able to apply pressure to the registrars office on your behalf if needed to get your hold lifted.
Having been on both sides of the fence here, this is highly contrary to my experience. Large institutions are more than happy, in many cases, to bully anybody when it benefits them. But as soon as possible legal/media issues emerge they're going to suddenly be your best friend looking to make things right as quickly and cleanly as possible.
The ombudsman is definitely not a bad idea, but in most cases the mere hint of legal involvement would get this resolved without any legal involvement - just going on for a consultation doesn't mean one has to go to the next step, and in all probability you won't have to.
Hard disagree. It doesn't harm to try to solve it with the help of a trusted intermediary. One doesn't lose anything but a bit of time. Instead it shows good faith. You can always escalate to the lawyer afterwards.
This is the right answer. A large institution like a university is not a monolith. The university will produce antibodies to external participants, like lawyers (or the media). You're most likely to get better outcomes if you can ensure the conflict plays out within the university and its rules, structures, and participants. Your work now is to convince other members of the university to advocate on your behalf. (It should not be difficult. If this is as you describe, reasonable faculty members will be your allies.)
The same goes for publicizing this further. The student newspaper is probably okay, but keep talking to other media in the room as a bargaining chip. Bad press may well force some administrator's hand.
To be sure, a chat with a lawyer may be helpful to get a sense of the universe of possible outcomes pursuing extramural action, but don't let anbyody send any lawyerly letters yet.
> You're most likely to get better outcomes if you can ensure the conflict plays out within the university and its rules, structures, and participants.
It's too late for that, even if you're correct here (and I don't think I agree). News of this has already spread, and will continue to spread.
You can consult a lawyer without having the lawyer engage with the university, and without the unviversity even knowing that you did.
Instead of taking your advice on the matter, maybe see what the lawyer has to say.
If they're attempting to extort him, then it's a legal matter whether or not he sees it that way.
Get a lawyer. Holding your degree hostage unless you work for them for free is off the charts ridiculous. They might have just paid for your entire education.
When I went to the UW I used Arexx and my 2400 baud modem to turbo register for classes the moment the system went live.
> Arexx and my 2400 baud modem
Arexx was fun back in the day. A nice scripting language for the time.
OP please consider listening to this reply. Do not rely on an unaccountable bureaucracy to "do the right thing." They don't.
At least he'll learn this valuable lesson pretty young. It was fairly devastating to me by the time I learned it well into my 30's.
Not to mention that University of Washington is a public university run by the state. IANAL but this may well fall into constitutional issues so the ACLU might be interested, not to mention any number of other pro-bono lawyers. Most attorneys I’ve interacted with give a free one hour consultation and this sounds like a rather clear case where they can at least refer the OP to someone in their network who might be interested in doing it for free (again IANAL).
Having seen what some other university administrations have done to darling students and innovators even just around such things as lab space, parent comment is right on the money.
^ This.
You need a trusted advisor on your side who can look at it with a calm mind and perspective on what is normal, acceptable, and legal. You're young and have been slapped around, seemingly inappropriately.
If you were in physical pain, you'd talk to a doctor to assess and get recommendations before treatment. Do the same here.
Trusted advisor doesn't need to be lawyer. Can be trusted professor.
No, you need someone who will represent YOUR interests both in public and private.
When the stakes are exceptionally high, don't ask for advice from someone paid by the agressor.
Negative feedback can be a net good for anyone, even if they don't like it in the moment, and even for conglomerate entities like a school. Petty bureaucratic admins abusing their authority to spite you are likely abusing it against others under their purview. Honestly if you feel you have an allegiance to the school there's an argument that it's your duty to oppose petty tyrants within it. Think of it as a service to the the ideal of the school.
And additionally a lawyer will help make him aware of alternatives he may not know about, and also give him warning as to what other strong arm tactics UW could do, and how to safeguard himself. It's truly a smart idea.
Also upvoting, as this is a valuable lesson as you head into a career: no company (nor school) cares about you more than they care about the organization. HR does not work for you and while the individuals may care for you personally, they will almost never act in "good faith".
Just another case of a business gradually feeling little respect for their customers.
If you had managed to build this system during my time at UW, I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project. The class and reservation system there was (and presumably is?) incredibly broken.
I remember literally the only way to get a spot reserved in some /mandatory/ courses was to find an upper classman with prioritized registration dates and a free schedule to hold the class for you. In you're in a frat, great. If you're a bit of an introvert that lives off campus, you're shit out of luck.
I imagine UW is fully aware of this, I cant believe that it's still so much an issue that they felt the jeed to expell you for even having the gall to demo an idea. Absolutely appalling
> I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project
Is this normal in the US, that students have high enough disposable income that they would be able to pay "hundreds of dollars" to use a webapp to swap classes with each other? Or is this school uniquely one for the more well-off kids out there?
Remembering my time when my friends were in university, some while working, just about no one would have hundreds of dollars to spend on something like that.
Some required courses are only taught in Spring or only in Fall. Some of those "Fall only" courses are prerequisites for other required Spring-only courses.
If you can't get into a required course, it can delay your graduation a full year. That costs way more than a couple hundred dollars.
I ended up needing to stay an extra semester for a single course my final semester, because I planned poorly and discovered too late that I couldn't get it in my would-have-been-penultimate semester.
> If you can't get into a required course, it can delay your graduation a full year. That costs way more than a couple hundred dollars.
Sure, but if you don't have "a couple of hundred dollars", you don't. It's a bit like saying "Why are people poor? Just put $1 million into a savings account, then you'll get enough to survive each month". Great for the ones who can, irrelevant for the ones who can't.
I think most students in America have loans. For me, and everyone I knew, there was a credit balance after the school got paid and that money was put into your bank account.
Don't forget you have to buy books, etc., and they cost "a couple of hundred dollars" too.
When I was an undergraduate I was definitely on a knife's edge, but I also often had cash in the bank because I got a big cash infusion annually. I just had to live off a very strict budget at that time to make sure the money would last.
I wouldn't have wanted to rely on this service when I was a student, especially at that cost, but in a pinch I could see situations where it would make sense.
I myself was never given access to any funds or credit from student loans.
It would have been nice if I did though.
My sister-in-law is going back for her masters right now. She did the maximum allowed loans from her FAFSA, so after her tuition and fees were paid, she had enough left over to draw a $300/wk "salary" from the remaining balance. She has to pay her rent and groceries and other bills from that, but she usually has about $100 a month left over for "fun" - if she lived in a cheaper apartment or took out additional loans, she'd have a lot "left over," and this is what a lot of Americans do.
Wait, why would anyone do this, though? It’s like taking a personal loan from the government that is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. The interest is going to accrue every year you go to uni.
If you use that to go long on the stock market, I get it since the S&P500 beats interest rates right now, though there’s a risk. Using it on personal expenses seems like the lowest EV choice!
Living expenses have to come from somewhere. If you use the time to graduate faster, instead of working to generate weekly income, in some cases you can come out ahead overall. Details vary, but it's not obvious that it's a bad deal.
Essential expenses it certainly makes sense. But it seems some amount of it is treated as disposable income rather than liability.
I haven't been in university in over 20 years, but when I was, I absolutely did not have hundreds of dollars to throw around for things to make my life more convenient. Certainly some of my peers did, but they were not in the majority.
Convenience was not a factor. If you were unable to sign up for some of these courses, you would be barred from advancing in your studies. These were things like prerequisites for applying to your major, not just shuffling around your timeslots for an ideal schedule.
Im unsure if this was much more of an issue at UW specifically (also this was also over a decade ago), but UW accepted maybe ~30% of the applicants to a given major (in STEM). They dont tell you this as a freshman when you declare your intended course of study, but you're competing with your classmates to actually be able to study what you want to major in. This leads to critical classes filling up within seconds, massive waitlists, and delays of semesters possible if you miss courses you need.
College is not cheap in the US. Going to any university in the US implies a certain amount of wealth, and barring that (scholarship, e.g.) then you must be someone who is incredibly motivated. In either case, spending a few hundred dollars to guaruntee a spot in a required course to keep your studies on track, to be accepted into your major, and to eventually graduate on time is worth AT LEAST a few hundred dollars. Like the other commenter, i also ended up needing to graduate a semester late due to this nonsense, which cost me thousands in actual money, and much more in lost potential income.
A lot of students at UW - especially ones in the CS department - come from rich families. A lot of foreign students as well - who again - come from a ton of money.
That system sounds so incredibly broken and exploitative. I'm sure it's a complete accident that the upshot is that some number of students have to spend tens of thousands extending their studies.
It absolutely is, especially realizing that a significant percentage of the applicants to these programs are international students, who have tuition fees 5x that of local students, and who have really no choice but to pay for another year of studies in order to reapply to their intended majors, or have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars and multiple years.
I am obviously jaded, after spending 2 years of tuition there, only to be rejected from my intended major, and told to spend the next year re-taking classes.
You may want to consult with a lawyer. This is starting to sound like extortion.
100% this. You'd be surprised what kinds of problems go away when you mention your lawyer casually or you have a lawyer send a letter. Even if you don't get the right kind of lawyer right away, they might be able to recommend someone or tell you how to research the right kind of lawyer to get ahold of. Professionals are usually helpful about those kinds of things.
Also get a second or third opinion. I've sometimes gotten different answers from different lawyers about our prospects of success on things we've called about.
Don't mention a lawyer casually. Just have the lawyer send a letter. Don't give them the option to call your bluff. People casually mention a lawyer so frequently it means nothing. Receiving a letter from an actual lawyer means everything.
Yes, you don't mention a lawyer, casually or otherwise. What you do is keep a paper trail, and optionally 'casually' notify the other party of said paper trail collection.
Having a lawyer send a letter isn't an automatic win. Once you turn it into a legal threat you force them to escalate to their legal team. Reasonable lawyers would likely roll their eyes and talk the university back from this weird move, but you're not guaranteed reasonable lawyers on the other end. If they feel threatened they might start looking even deeper into into contracts you signed as a way to protect themselves or as legal leverage to silence you with further threats.
I've witnessed a couple cases where things went from hiring a lawyer, to sending a letter, to a stalemate where legal bills started getting so expensive that the only winners were the lawyers. When you're dealing with a big bureaucracy you can't count on them giving up at the first sight of a letter from a lawyer.
The legal route also takes time and locks any further conversations into the speed of both sides' lawyers. Time matters in this case because this student needs to get registered for classes, so anything that could stall that process needs to be weighed carefully.
I wouldn't be surprised if this issue magically goes away as soon as the publicity comes around to local news media and/or some alumni with connections.
> Once you turn it into a legal threat you force them to escalate to their legal team.
Assuming we have the relevant facts of the case, it seems like when UW's legal team gets involved, they will tell the relevant people in the university's leadership "wtf were you thinking, de-escalate immediately, and allow this kid to enroll in classes and graduate", and the problem will go away for OP.
Good lawyers don't send letters automatically. They help the client whether that's involved the media, etc.
Once lawyers are involved, they are always going to be the only winners.
What makes you think so?
Because even if you "win", you now have all of those lovely legal bills that the lawyer sends you. If you loose, you now have all of those lovely legal bills that the lawyer sends you. So the lawyer wins either way.
Involving lawyers doesn't automatically mean you are going to court. Going to court is expensive, yes.
Most issues can be settled out of court for much cheaper. A good lawyer can help you make that happen.
All campuses have student legal aid offices. I engaged one once myself when I was in university. Even though the complaint is against the University itself, in this case, attorneys are still subject to strict ethical rules and so you can at the very least get an honest read on the situation at a very low or no cost to you. (if they clearly demonstrate a conflict of interest, then you'll have an easy pro-bono case from a real lawyer against the University now for two things)
I would take a look at your Student Legal Aid office and get an appointment. Usually consultations are free.
You can't use the student aid legal office, which is part of the university, to help you sue the university. That's a non-waivable conflict.
Well yeah, if you hire someone to help you with something, you often end up owing them money, whether or not it ends up successful.
Whether it ends up being successful or not while still having to pay the lawyer is how the lawyer always win. This is not the gotcha you think it is
Except the original claim was that *only* the lawyers win.
Hmmmm. Yes but, if I hire a programmer to build me an app and no one ever uses it, I still have to pay the programmer.
This is exactly the gotcha. You paid for a service. The outcome isn’t guaranteed.
Did you need to use a tractor to move those goal posts?
Oncologists get paid even if the cancer kills you, that's not a good argument against oncologists.
Did they move goal posts though? The original claim was that "once lawyers are involved, lawyers are the only winners." "Only" because "even if you win you still have to pay the lawyers."
Even if your app is successful, you still have to pay the programmers. Even if you sell the building, you still have to pay the construction crew. Even if you're packed during dinner service you still have to pay the chef.
None of these scenarios are painted as a pyrrhic victory because you had to pay the people who made it possible. All those people are generally paid hourly too. Is it because a good lawyer will bill you $400/hr? Is it because those generally have a lot more upside financially than simply winning a court case?
I think it's projecting anger from spec attorneys taking 40% of personal injury judgments, or class action attorneys making $50 million in fees when the people affected get checks for $8.72, but neither of those apply here particularly when you're paying an attorney $75 to send a demand letter template on their letterhead.
> Because even if you "win", you now have all of those lovely legal bills that the lawyer sends you
Oh come on, that's like saying when you involve engineers to build a bridge, the only people who wins are the engineers because you have to pay them.
Engineers don't get paid more when a project gets further delayed.
You've obviously never worked in consulting.
Plenty of engineers and firms bill hourly, so yes sometimes they do.
Ever get a $5 settlement check from a class action?
When lawyers are paid hourly to talk to each other on behalf of their clients, sometimes the bill can get sky high if not managed.
That might be the way to bet but casually mentioning a lawyer once worked for me on a used car warranty claim. I didn't make any threats, I just said "my mechanic says X and my lawyer says Y" and they said we'll call you back, which they did in ten minutes and said I was covered after all.
If that's actually what your lawyer says, then there's nothing wrong with that, but if you don't have a lawyer and they call your bluff, you're worse off than before you ran your mouth. So it's not really too much different than me telling about that one time I was in Vegas and I rolled a seven.
I had a buddy who was a lawyer, who spent a few minutes looking over the contract as a favor. There was no bet for them to call since I wasn't threatening action, just pointing out what the contract actually said (which my buddy confirmed for me).
It was under a thousand bucks so I could have just taken them to small claims court if they didn't fold. That may have worked in my favor.
So you just have to make sure you actually talk to a lawyer before you talk to anyone else.
[flagged]
The one time I mentioned getting a lawyer over a grievance with a car dealership, the customer service people immediately stopped talking to me and said all further communication goes through their lawyers.
Whoops
That’s the only reasonable thing to do in their position. Anything you say from there can and will be used against you.
It’s also the best way for any customer service rep to eject from an unpleasant exchange. 100% done with you; lawyers problem now.
Yeah, lawyering up works best in silence. Don't announce it, especially if you won't actually do it. That's just a double defeat, you show your hand in advance and they get defensive.
It's all fun and games until you're called into a deposition.
It is absolutely extortion. What a bunch of arseholes. I can't believe they even suggested that.
Definitely doesn’t hurt to get opinions when the other side has hundreds of resources and billions of dollars.
One half of me is sympathetic with you, the other wonders whether you're trying to get attention for a job (this is how the end of your LinkedIn post makes it sound).
It's hard to judge from the outside as you haven't shared the actual writing from UW.
I would probably cut this from the end of the LinkedIn post, this makes you look like you're possibly trying to blow this out of proportion for attention:
> I'm scheduled to graduate in a few months and am eager to move on to projects that don't need to be cleared with the UW Registrar. If you know of anyone looking for a full-time software engineer with a knack for getting the attention of senior leadership, please send them my way! I can start full-time in June
Your LinkedIn profile states you graduated high school mid 2023 and started at UW mid-late 2023. How can you graduate in a few months already? That would mean you'd just take 2 years instead of the normal 4?
> One half of me is sympathetic with you, the other wonders whether you're trying to get attention for a job (this is how the end of your LinkedIn post makes it sound).
Why not both. I hire, and it crossed my mind to reach out to him when I read the ending. The project shows ambition and independent thought, two virtues in my book.
He's smart to leverage the attention. Might as well get some benefit out of the university's heavy-handed policing here.
I'm not sure whether I can trust the story as he presents it. The fact that he might be out for attention is a reason to have doubts, because he might have made the case look more extreme than it is so it trends better.
There are a couple of other question marks:
- Says he'll graduate this year, but he's only started at UW 1.5y ago, his project team mates also started 1.5y ago, so the course does not seem to be super advanced
- Claims he did the project on his own in the LinkedIn post, when in fact it was coursework by a team of 6
- The docs promise stuff that are entirely unimplemented, I couldn't find anything related to talking to the UW API
> 1.5y vs 4y
That's pretty common. Details vary, but having 1-3y of credit you can transfer in and then only having to stick it out for 1-3y to navigate the maze of upper-level course requirements happens all the time.
In my case, MN heavily subsidized AP and CLEP tests at the time and didn't require you to take the class to take the test. A couple heavy weeks of testing later, and 2yrs of college was banged out. Toss in the fact that the credit cap per semester is just a guideline the dean is happy to override, and finishing early is all but guaranteed.
A hundred or so of my high-school classmates had other paths to similar endings. They took AP courses almost exclusively in HS, and their last year or two they'd spend a lot of their HS getting dual credit from a local community college. They all started with at least a year done, usually much more.
In general I worry about ragebait stories that trend on HN.
They're sometimes legit, but way too often there's a quiet coda where someone figures out it was all a sham, but that discovery occurs after the story has already been drawing attention for 24 hours or more, and the recall doesn't get the attention the initial rage did. So people walk away remembering a story that was a lie, while the truth gets quickly forgotten.
I also worry about this which is why I've been researching things and posting my findings here. I wish this got picked up by at least the student newspaper. UW should be able to present their side. Hard to predict whether we will ever know the truth.
It must have been a survey course. Frankly, I found the course rather elementary.
What's a survey course? It turns out that at least another team in the same course had the exact same app idea: https://www.sammybharadwaj.com/huskyswap - even same name. Sounds like this idea was either given by the instructor or the groups cooperated on choosing it.
Hence the idea of swapping must not have been the problem here, otherwise surely the instructor should be more in trouble than OP, and this other website shouldn't still be up.
I remember that class - it was just between recess and lunch!
It's possible there's deception here, but I also knew a few kids in high school who graduated with their Associates (equivalent to 2 years of college). This can allow a student to skip the general education courses and focus exclusively on major coursework, which depending on the program and how well the student can schedule classes can mean finishing in 2 years.
Their profile also mentions "Stanford Summer Session" in Jun 2022, which does give college credit, so Associates or not they were definitely more active in pursuing a degree than most high school students.
> That would mean you'd just take 2 years instead of the normal 4?
FWIW my wife was a fourth-year the start of her second year at uni because she'd tested out of a ton of basics or taken dual-credit courses in high school. I was a fourth-year the end of my second year.
I AP'd my way out of 6 hours of English, 14 or so hours of Spanish, 8 hours of physics, 8 hours of calculus, and a hodgepodge of psych, sociology, etc., plus I'd taken some uni courses as a high school student as well.
I basically spent two years taking nothing but upper div math classes + a year living in Japan working on a second degree.
AP classes, my friend, save you so much time and money.
Only saves time if you consider being in university a waste of time instead of an opportunity to be free to learn what you are interested in and surrounded by like-minded people.
Oh it’s great. But depending on what country you are in, it could be the difference between a lifetime debt, and economic freedom.
University is definitely not a place where you are free to learn whatever you want, unless you already have all your credit points.
If you have all the credits done within 2 years you can spend the other 2 years learning whatever you want :)
Something definitely smells.
Washington state (and many others, I'm assuming) have systems in place that allow high school students to take collegiate level classes in lieu of high school classes.
Done to completion, it is possible (and becoming more common) to exit high school with an Associates degree and the first 2 years of college completed.
UW CSE alum (but graduated 1^H25 years ago).
You should at least talk to a guidance counselor if you are close to graduating. They have a lot of incentive to get you graduated, and would probably just register you for your courses manually (because...you weren't officially expelled so there has to be a way). Anyways, the counselor will have options for you, and won't be constrained by whoever is running the registration site (and aren't going to be their allies either). If that doesn't work, go to UW administration, they are going to be less interested in allying with the tech department the higher up you go (unless this came from them, and not the tech department?).
Alternatively, if you can put your work with the university on your CV, it isn't a clear loss for you. You should also consider getting a lawyer involved, but it might be better just to get what you can and graduate.
This is some sound advice. The student hasn’t actually been expelled, he’s just pissed off the registrar, by making an an app that says “HuskySwap is a platform designed for students at the University of Washington ("UW") to swap classes with one another. ” (against the rules) but not expelled.
This is a huge story and if it goes viral, it could put a lot of heat on UW. Write a detailed post on your LinkedIn, Twitter, anywhere that could get the attention of media. Better yet, link your post here and I'd gladly help spread the word. What UW is doing is extortion especially for their fuck-up. Be polite in your post and just write down the facts.
Might be best to talk to that lawyer first before risking libelling the Uni, or anything they could reasonably claim...
Twitter, Substack and Bluesky is where journalists are too right?
It would be a huge story.. if it were true.
The moment a journalist looks into they will spot what this actually is.
This is very good advice. Human beings tend to overlook, minimize, or just not closely examine their own failings, expecially painful and shameful ones. And then when they tell the story to others, they tend to portray themselves as victims - innocent and persecuted.
But you need to be very careful when you go from telling your friends to making public, consequential, legal moves. Contact a journalist, and they will want to find the whole story, not just your fanciful version. Involve lawyers and the same thing will happen.
Talk to a lawyer first; let them dig in and find the real story; be completely open and honest. Then see where you stand.
You're making a lot of assumptions, unless you actually have facts, I don't see how you can justify those statements.
You mean like the entire post we're commenting on?
All we have is the word of some student who is trying to frame themselves positively.
Wait till the response by UW
> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
An officious word for lawyer is counsel, because that’s what they’re for: they offer legal counsel. You don’t technically “talk” to a lawyer , instead you ask them questions. They answer. That’s why client-attorney privilege exists at all: so you can feel free to seek counsel, ie ask questions, without fear of those questions ever being held against you.
You’re right not to talk to a lawyer. Instead, you should ask them questions. Like “what’s the worst that can happen?” and “what are my options if it does?” and “ what documents / evidence would I need to defend myself?” and “what would you advise me not to do?”.
As a silly rule of thumb: every message to a lawyer should have at least one question mark in it. That is the role of legal counsel in our society. Use that privilege. Seek counsel.
Then, if you don’t want to do anything with their advice, that’s ok.
As a lawyer, your post is almost entirely incorrect. Privilege in no way depends on whether the communication involves questions.
It cracks me up. As a lawyer, I would never post on HN to argue about pointer arithmetic or inference optimization, yet the law seems to be fair game for amateur hour.
I don't think the post says privilege depends on whether the communication involves questions. I read it as saying that privilege exists so you can seek counsel. And, in their opinion, seeking counsel should always involve asking questions. Which seems reasonable to me. I am struggling to think of a situation where someone initiating contact with a lawyer wouldn't need, or at least want, to ask any questions. Are there situations where that is not the case?
I'm a software engineer who has had to explain the law (HIPAA) to lawyers before. It's probably best to assume that in a population there are people who are both an expert/professional of X, who can say intelligent things about Y.
I want to elaborate on what the GP said. The best way to use a lawyer in most circumstances is to ask them questions about actions you can take through the legal system and listen to their answers, treating them as a counsellor.
> Privilege in no way depends on whether the communication involves questions.
I sure hope most lawyers don't often misread other people's writing as bad as you did here.
>I would never post on HN to argue about pointer arithmetic or inference optimization, yet the law seems to be fair game for amateur hour.
In all fairness, You would probably be ok with criticizing software or a website that didn't work for you and offer improvements or features. There's certainly nothing wrong with that.
Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of Hashicorp [0]) did something similar to this, but to find open slots in courses he wanted in college according to his blog [1]. You're on the right track.
From the linked page: "As I began college, I noticed that the poor technical design of the registration system made it incredibly difficult to get the set of classes I wanted. I developed automated registration software that would detect open slots in the full courses, and notify me via text message. While my friends were spending hours every day refreshing course schedules hoping to get into a full class, I was just waiting for a text message. And I always got into the classes, because a human refreshing a browser can't beat my software that was checking thousands of times per hour. Automation wins again."
I thought I had read somewhere that he turned it into a product while he was in college, but that wasn't mentioned there.
[0] https://www.hashicorp.com [1] https://mitchellh.com/writing/automation-obsessed
It’s a fun coincidence that it’s the same university/college, Michael Hashimoto went to UW (CSE).
I reckon most HNers in such a situation have made the same script, I know I did.
I didn't have to, my college provided fairly functional class scheduling systems. It had integrated wait lists, so you could just sign up and hope someone else drops if needed, and occasionally you could just have the professor add another slot (the college didn't mind the free extra money).
I had this in a state school that isn't even our state's premier state school, and we are not a state known for computer science or anything, why do all these supposedly premier institutions not offer it?
i did it literally yesterday! my sleep schedule's all out of wack, so i miss the slightly-late emails the public services send.
now i get a nice loud fire alarm beep to wake me up when someone drops a course i want ;^)
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
WTF!
That can’t be legal
> I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
I would never ever trust those hypocritical bureaucrats in universities. They have power over your degree and your life, but you have nothing. They are businessmen and politicians (some of which actually had/will have a political life before/after the high education gig), not educators.
You high school teachers and university professors are real humans. Administrators are not.
This is bonkers, and sort of smells. I’m not saying you have outright said anything untrue, but there is at least some ambiguity that my mind is filling in, potentially incorrectly.
Can you clarify how you got the Swagger files? Were they publicly available?
Could you share the exact verbiage they used to seemingly extort labor and intellectual property from you?
Does the university have some previously existing (and communicated/documented) policy regarding swapping or trading seats?
I wouldn't answer this question if I were the OP.
Neither would I, but they're very good questions. If I was OP, I'd want to make sure my answers were watertight.
Honestly this. I agree the registrar can be shitbag; but having a method to request token access but also blocking the OP here even though he claims he never actually had real data on his site, but was planning on using the legally-requested-token to populate it in the future? That smells of half the story i think.
My guess being OP was probably running the service for months under-the-radar via scraping prior, and they didn't notice him until he requested the token to help clean up his data. Else they punished him before* he actually did anything wrong? yea, just smells.
This doesn’t even make sense… why is you rebuilding it for them even part of the discussion? You built a demo of something they didn’t like, so you took it down. That should be the end of it.
Saying you need todo it for free is bonkers. Students who work in the cafeteria get paid…
And the gap between “a greenfield project” versus rebuilding the app in their infrastructure is so huge… This type of app would take 6 months to build minimum. So insane.
If you only have a few months left, you will barely get out of the initial project scoping meetings talking to all of the various departments (legal, it, hr, etc etc)
Given all of the very public stories about university administrations and how they like to skirt the law/court system with their own tribunals and procedures and/or blackmail their own students to stay quiet why would you ever have a reason to have faith in them?
It's clear the ones running things do not care about their students. They care only about their bottom line and appearances. Don't let one or two nice administrators fool you. Get a lawyer.
Call a lawyer, there has to be some who specialize in educational rights violations. I can’t believe the state of education in this country that your own university would harm your life in such a way for an honesty effort to improve things. Fuck whomever at UW pulled this trigger, they need to be fired.
Nationally there’s FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who (despite a recent name change) are focused on campus free speech rights.
On your post on LinkedIn, you said this:
> I was instructed to take down my demo site (and its handful of fake demo classes) or else they would begin the process that would culminate with my expulsion.
And now here, you say this:
> They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter.
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
I don't think there's any reason to have faith that their leadership will make things right. It sounds like they've already moved the goalposts once, and there's no reason to trust that they wouldn't do it again later. They no longer deserve the presumption of good faith.
As an alternative to what the options here seem to be saying, I can't help but wonder if some other university might be more willing to work with you without having to go through all of the blackmail. If this is something that's actually valuable to UW, it probably would be valuable to others as well, and without the threat of expulsion, you might be able to get better terms from them; maybe someone here with a connection to a more open-minded university could help get the door open to making a more fair deal? If finishing your degree is important to you, and you still don't have any desire to make a business out of this, maybe some form of scholarship in return for making a system for them for something like this? Alternately, if you do end up wanting to own the IP and monetize it in some way, you could try to rework the idea to be a service you sell to universities rather than offer for free to students. Even if you don't want to sell it, you could always offer it to universities for free with some terms that require attribution to you (and maybe also stipulate that no one is allowed to share the code with UW, since you deserve some compensation from them even if you don't want it from anyone else).
Sounds like you are being blackmailed into working for them for free
Right, if he does work for them, he is worth a full time salary for a new software engineer. That is at minimum, he can argue that he is worth a company founder salary.
Founder salaries are generally not high (at least until the company becomes mature). They own a (significant) portion of the company and want to minimize burn.
But when the founder sells and remains working they generally get a good income.
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
This is extortion.
>I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
What about their actions so far suggests that?
Yeah maybe OP really is grifting us all
I was a similar position as yours when I was at university. Do not have faith in your university administration.
You need to figure out who exactly you are dealing with and who is making these decisions and then find out who you need to be talking to in order to get what you need. The person putting you on the hold is probably a very low level person in the registrars office. Probably start with going to your professors if you have good relationships with them or if not figure out how to speak with someone who understands and has more authority. I don't think lawyers are going to do much for you.
The lack of compensation sounds like extortion. Definitely consult a lawyer.
Most universities seem now to include IP rights grabs in the matriculation documents you have to agree to when starting your course. If you squint, and apply a dose of salt, the OPs side of things sounds like a compromise offer to move forward allowing the student not to give over current IP but to develop something new.
Depending on contracts, and local laws, that might be almost legal...
Realistically, and obviously I'm not a lawyer, but if it was developed as part of a course, I can see how that might (not saying I agree with it) make the IP rights assignment more complicated and maybe the university would have a leg to stand on?
Please get a lawyer. This is a crazy, non-reasonable stipulation "They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate....unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for."
This new development is practically a gift.
The last thing in the world you want at this point is to be getting into any big fights obviously, but wow did they just give you about 3 legs to stand on.
As you describe it, it sounds like some element of the university may have made a mistake, but (no offense) I'm not yet certain that you fully understand the situation and are being fully forthright.
Hopefully, the matter will be cleared up quickly and satisfactorily, for all parties.
> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that [university] leadership will make it right in the end.
Ironically, the fact that you went public on what could be a delicate internal matter might've escalated things, more than consulting a lawyer would.
At a university, if there's at least one specific administrator or full professor who you both trust, and think has clout to resolve the matter satisfactorily, then trusting the university to make things right might be reasonable.
Or, if your university is a rare one that has unusually good conventions of honorable behavior, which you know are practiced by most (including administrators, faculty, staff, and students), and there are effective checks and balances for when that fails, then maybe you're also OK.
But, in most universities, when an official is talking about possibly ruining your career/life, then either you fudged up really-really badly (so, consult a lawyer), or you're in danger of learning just how bad a largely unaccountable institution of largely unaccountable individuals can get (so, consult a lawyer).
Also, if an official you're talking with ever asks if you've filed a lawsuit, and says they have to stop talking with you if you do, don't say that you want to work collegially with the university to resolve the situation internally. A shitty person hearing that will totally take advantage of naive you, to neutralize the risk from you. Run, don't walk, to consult a lawyer.
With apologies if I'm misunderstanding or my glasses are too rose-colored. Is it possible that there are crossed wires here?
You say: "They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter."
Is it possible that some tiresome UW admin person has put your account on hold while this is being sorted out, but they haven't connected the dots that you now won't be able to register? Is the "de facto expulsion" an unintended consequence rather than a deliberate punishment?
And then perhaps this person is trying to say, hey, there's a way we could keep your project going if it's an official project, but we don't have budget for it. Let's discuss if that would work for you. And perhaps this was intended to be a suggestion for a positive outcome, rather than an IP-grabbing maneuver.
And when you say, "it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate." I totally get that it feels that way, but is it possible that such an aggressive implication wasn't intended?
This might be wishful thinking on my part. It just seems so hard to believe that anything you've done comes remotely close to actual expulsion, and this idea that you'd be forced to work to graduate seems like a total head-scratcher that wouldn't stand up to any scrutiny. I'm hoping that this is just a poorly-handled, poorly-worded communication from this department.
Be extremely careful about what you say online or to friends from now on. They may use anything against you.
Do not give any extra details about the project, do not comment on how it was made and what it used etc.
Might be too late for that: https://github.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap
> have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter. Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university
Not a lawyer, but this is outrageous and feels like a breach of the university-student contract. Point to the other students that must perform surprise labor for the university as a precondition for course registration. This is like paying your debt to the early 1900s company store. Absolutely lawyer up.
> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
That's incredibly foolish. UW has treated you very poorly at this point, and they have all the leverage and power here. You need to protect yourself legally. You've done nothing wrong (AFAICT), and yet you've been threatened with expulsion, and now they are attempting to extort you: "provide us with uncompensated labor or we won't let you graduate".
You might even have a criminal complaint around that last bit. Assuming good faith by the university (an entity that has already shown plenty of bad faith) is naive, to say the least.
Shut the fuck up and start calling lawyers now.
| I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
Please do not plan based on anyone's goodwill only, especially in this one you have such a high stake. I'd at least consult a lawyer at this point, even if it means you don't take any legal action.
Find out what "agree to work" means, they may have very different ideas then you on what effort they're asking for. Also you only need to be in good graces with registrar office until classes begin. So maybe just say what they want to appease them then make long timelines, slow roll and eventually ghost when you have your diploma. "As a solo dev this will take over a year", "I don't want to stress the API during registration season", "My employer doesn't allow me to work on volunteer projects"
They're using bureaucracy to save face for themselves. Once this is out of view, they're going to forget about it.
Don’t rely on them “making it right in the end.” Get a lawyer. Get a referral from the WA State Bar Association for someone who is familiar with federal and state law regarding universities and will take $100 or so to send a letter that ensures you graduate on time.
I'm a university professor, and this is batshit crazy.
Who? As in not "they" or "the university", but who within the university? Can you tell where the directive is coming from?
If this comes from, say, the Provost's Office then this probably can't be handled internally. (The position of Provost is the #2 position at a university, and the provost usually runs the show while the President or Chancellor goes schmoozing with donors.)
But if it's coming from the Registrar's Office, then the Registrar doesn't have that much power internally, and you might be able to fight this decision within the university. What they did is not only brazenly immoral, it is also a tremendous legal liability for UW, and it should and might be a firing offense for whoever is responsible. And quite frankly no matter what happens I would seriously consider hiring an attorney (you might find one who will work on contingency).
You might speak with any professors in the department you have a good relationship with; I would be very surprised if they were sympathetic to this decision.
You might also talk with the university ombudsman, Dean of Students, etc. -- although I would be a little bit cautious and polite here. Just calmly describe the situation and ask what you should do in this situation. Hopefully (but this is very far from certain), they will calmly offer to intervene on your behalf, and then they will go ballistic behind closed doors and absolutely rake the Registrar over the coals. In any case, be poker faced, don't fully trust them, and avoid committing to a particular course of action if you don't have to.
Finally, here's an amusing hack. Salaries at UW are public record. If you want to find out how important any individual person is in the hierarchy, look up how much money they make. It's a fairly accurate barometer.
https://fiscal.wa.gov/Staffing/Salaries
Universities are not monoliths, and the relationships between different power centers are usually mistrustful at best.
Best of luck to you.
Are those numbers a sum of the total benefits or something? It seems insane that a campus security guard is making 170k.
It's total pay without benefits. It includes overtime and on-call time (which are typically paid at a higher rate).
It wouldn't surprise me that an experienced security guard is making $170K; the state itself is expensive, and they have to retain staff. The staff is often ex-cop, and guards very frequently work overtime (paid time-and-a-half or more). The guard may be a people manager (I don't know which row you're referring to but it looks like the typical guard makes far less).
Consider the liability to which a bad security guard can expose your organization! Not that pay guarantees quality but still
I don't know.
I knew that salaries at public universities are public in many states, so thought to google it -- but the details can vary.
It seems insane that you need campus security guards at all oO
A lot of campuses have actual police. In some ways campuses are similar to a municipality and have many of the services that entails (fire, trash, water, power, snow removal, parks, and security/law enforcement).
You could similarly ask why a town of 50,000 people needs a police department.
When you put it in terms of total number of people...it does make sense. A lot of universities down here in Texas have a small town+ amount of students and faculty and they tend to have their own police departments and other services.
My university had a police department because it is, as one might expect of a flagship state university, an enormous landmass with billions of dollars in infrastructure and equipment, plus about 6,000 full-time residents living in university-owned housing. Residents of a certain class of people who are prone to doing stupid, illegal shit.
Why?
Because police is a thing?...
Having worked in university administration before I would say that anyone who lasts as a manager is a professional politician, so expect them to have engineered a very good reason and possibly have allied with another department.
As manager pay is usually based on headcount instead of being aligned with good outcomes, they might just have threatened someone's mortgage payments. So, that manager might be willing to call in every favor and fight with everything they have got.
But yeah of course it's possible that they got into more trouble than they can handle.
The head coach of football gets paid $4mil a year (4x the president) and is the highest payed employee. The top 7 staff are all sports related.
Is this, like, common in the US? It seems batshit insane to an outsider.
A college like UW may have sports revenue on order of $300M, much of which goes to the university, and means students may pay less than if there were no sports. Dig carefully through UW finances, which are usually public record. Paying a coach whose program is a massive profit center enough to have a team of quality enough to land bigger TV deals may be a financial benefit.
I always see people saying that sports is financially positive on its own, but my actual experience is a ~10% tuition hike to subsidize sports expansion, so ...
My university's athletics program pulls in so much money and some of it funds academic programs. No money goes from academics to sports.
So the athletics department is not only self-sustaining and self-funding, but it funds academics as well.
It's basically as if Man U sent some of its profits to Manchester University.
Very common at larger state universities that have been around a long enough time to have a significant sports following.
It makes sense if you do the math.
Newer schools and smaller schools, typically not so much.
A lot of what we do in the US probably sounds batshit insane to outsiders so no worries about that and thanks for asking!
Universities in the US administer the main second-tier sports leagues for basketball and football, so yes, it’s common (though strange, I agree).
Yes, this is extremely common.
On the one hand, yes, this is absolutely batshit insane.
On the other hand, college sports are enormously popular; football games regularly play to sold out crowds of over 50,000, and during football season there will be games on TV all weekend (not just local ones). They bring in a lot of revenue and publicity for the university -- and the latter (debatably?) helps attract students to apply.
I'd never considered that a sports program could be revenue producing. That's quite interesting. Although it seems weird that higher education and (almost-professional) sports are so tightly coupled.
An interesting outsider perspective is this clip of Steven Fry going to an Auburn game: https://youtu.be/FuPeGPwGKe8
Regarding the latter, it’s weird and certainly was exploitative when college athletes weren’t allowed to monetize through sponsorships and frankly still is exploitative.
I was more thinking that there's not a particularly natural overlap between sports and academic ability. You'd think that by tying the two together, you'd get both worse sporting and academic performance than if they were unrelated.
The US has a decidedly liberal viewpoint on education. Sports ability is in some sense an educational endeavor. The ancient Greeks called it "athletics".
So US educational institutions don't really have any hangup against treating sports any differently than they might treat a CS class.
They are a subject you have to study and train at...and sometimes sit in a theatre and have a class time about (watching scout footage or deconstructing plays, etc).
Sports are probably just as rigorous as anything else academically once you get to something approaching a division 1 level of play. The reason we don't recognize it is because we suck and are mostly casual about it on a forum like this (filled with sports failures like myself or sports non-participants). The people actually in these programs with D1 scholarships and whatnot I guarantee take it as seriously as you or I would take calculus.
I never meant to imply that athletics wasn't a serious pursuit. I agree that physical capability is part of being a well-rounded person. It's certainly common here (Aus) for schools and universities to have sports teams and to strongly encourage participation.
What I find strange in the US context is the emphasis on it as a (revenue generating!) spectator sport. I understand that amateur (for want of a better word) sports can be highly entertaining; what I don't understand is why you'd go to university teams to find the best amateurs. I've played and watched enough sport to know that it's common for academic and physical abilities to be not particularly well correlated, particularly at tails of the distributions.
This is hardly an American phenomenon. The Bauhaus was famous for incorporating athletics too.
It's batshit insane either way in the grand scheme of things. It just goes to show how market forces don't necessarily incentivize the things we actually want or need.
It seems like crowds of 50,000 people want this enough to regularly pay for it, subsidising other people’s education in the process.
Yes, and not just at public universities.
As you describe it, this is so egregious that you might find pro-bono legal support from major advocacy non-profits like The Institute for Justice.
Does your university have a student's union? I'm not sure if this is common in the US. But in the UK they're usually incredibly effective at sorting out this kind of issue.
Am I reading it correctly that you asked for a read only access token, never received the token or accessed the site with your software, and got a take down notice for your demo that only had fake data hours after asking if you could read data?
Please don't listen to all of these folks who are trying to bring conflict into your life. You did something interesting, and learned a lesson about how big institutions actually work. It is a great story, and one that you can tell your friends.
The easiest path forward is to do what it takes to graduate, it sounds like you are one quarter away. Smile, play nice, help out where you can. Get everything in writing.
Definitely TALK to a lawyer and have that in your back pocket. It is likely there is some sort of legal aid through the law school and you can. However, only use this as a last resort. It would be no problem for a university to drag something like this out for months or years and you will be left without a degree.
That's reasonable advice if he could cease to work on his project and status quo were resumed, but from his telling of events, it sounds like they're saying he can't study at all unless he works for them for free. Such a scenario would be extortion, and is worth taking the stand on IMO.
There is already conflict in his life at this point. The question is how best to resolve it. The school is in a position of authority and is telling the student that after spending tens of thousands of dollars at his school, he can't register for his final quarter necessary to graduate, unless he provides additional free work for them. This absolutely should not be tolerated.
Everyone in this thread is simply suggesting he talk to a lawyer. The lawyer can help guide him on the next action to take.
If you manage to have them tell you that in an email that will be the jackpot for you.
Confirmation emails are great for this.
"I was wondering if you could go over the details of the resolution we discussed on DATE? I'm giving it consideration and just want to make sure I fully understand. On reflection I feel like it could be a great opportunity. Could I put it on my resume'?"
Sometimes they stitch themselves up and it's glorious when it happens.
Do you need an account to register for classes? Can't you just register in-person like I did back when we roamed the earth with dinosaurs?
At UW? No. You must log in at exactly 6am (preferably 5:58) on your registration day. Have your planned schedule in hand with all class codes and multiple backups. Assuming the system doesn't crash repeatedly, all of the required and/or popular classes will be full by 6:05.
Rinse. Repeat for the entire 2 weeks of registration.
This is pretty much how it works at every school I've ever attended. It ended up driving me towards "hacking" by writing a bunch of scripts to register as fast as possible, taught me some basic networking in the challenges I faced while doing that, and occasionally grabbed me a seat in a class I normally wouldn't have. However, I think a lot of other students in CS were also doing similar, because it would never make sense how stuff could fill as fast as they did. As a result, sometimes I would have to beg to be allowed to take a graduate level course to fill a requirement, just because it had seats. Ended up working out for me, as one of those graduate professors ended up offering me a job in my 2nd to last quarter, but I wouldn't be surprised if such overloaded systems just brutally sabotage people's entire education.
This sounds like they are trying to extort you.
Do what I did when UDub pushed me out: finish at UOregon.
>Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further.
Others have already told you that talking to a lawyer is still a good idea. If I may offer a personal story that illustrates that that is _really_ a good idea:
While I did my Bachelor's in CS, I was employed by a university (not the one I attended, but one that the project I worked on moved to after the Prof in charge switched universities) as a "student worker" type deal. My job was essentially a Jr. SWE.
A friend of mine also worked on that project, but he was ahead a bit further in his studies, so he already had a BSc degree, while I hadn't. Universities being universities, this meant that his hourly pay was a tiny smidge more than mine (think 50 cents/hour or something like that). Neither of us was paid very well, we both came out to about 10-12 €/hour.
After 6 months my contract was up for renewal. Along with the renewal, they included a modest pay raise to my friend's level. I naively thought that that meant they appreciated my work or something like that. All went well until the _next_ renewal was up.
The HR person responsible for student workers noticed that my "raise" had been in error because they assumed I had gotten my degree as well. None of their paperwork that I signed originally mentioned that. As "proof" that I "should have known" that the raise was in error, they sent along a scanned copy of a copy of a copy of an internal "wage schedule" that I somehow should've been aware of.
Their solution was to hand me a "new" backdated contract with lower hourly wages and told me to sign that to "just quickly fix this error" and told me to just pay back what I had "erroneously" received (signed contract stating the contrary nonwithstanding).
I politely declined because that's not how I think employment works. As a response they said "ah well, don't worry, we'll just take it out of your next pay check", which they did (without me signing anything).
At that point I called my mom and told her the full story. She immediately went "Alright, how do you want to play this? Should we talk to them or do you want to pull out the big guns?". I was sufficiently pissed off that I told her I want the big guns, she told me the info for my families' "lawsuit insurance" (The German term is "Rechtsschutzversicherung", basically cheap-ish insurance to help you pay for a lawyer in cases like this) and called them after we talked.
I called up a lawyer in town that specialized in employment law, had an appointment with him to tell him the story, he went "I can see roughly 4 or 5 reasons that they can't take that money from you, let me write a letter to them and we'll see how it goes".
The end result was that the university in my next paycheck included the amount they had initially reduced my previous check by, my higher-wage contract was renewed, and we never spoke of any of that again. I didn't get an apology or anything from the HR admin who had clearly messed up my contract and was probably trying to cover her ass, but that's fine with me.
Point being: talk to a lawyer, even just to get some advice or to have them write out a nice letter as to why what they're doing is not OK.
What they're doing isn't just wrong, it's abusive and possibly illegal, and I'm sorry that you're having to deal with this.
Please seek legal advice and do not take anything they say at face value. They're engaging in bad faith and preying on your fears and ignorance.
Just remember that your didn't do anything wrong, and I hope that you don't get discouraged from your future pursuits, I'm almost certain that there are employers out there who will love this and offer you a great start your career.
talk to a lawyer, it doesn’t mean taking action, but I’ve been in a number of situations at work that were quite “grey”, and the value of knowing where I stood, where the lines were, and what to do/not to do were invaluable. I never planned on taking legal action, but knowing the landscape was invaluable and often kept me out of trouble down the road when people were playing CYA…
> This platform was never intended to be monetized, and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
Hopefully the Streisand Effect will force them to do the right thing.
I upvoted your LinkedIn post.
You've encountered a psychopath in the wild. "You did such a good job we want to show our appreciation by _stealing your work and threatening your future to do it while compensating you nothing_."
It's so egregious. If you do a gofundme for legal support where would you post it? So we can follow you there.
Sounds like UW does not follow its own Honor Code.
This does sound like extortion, please don’t get pushed over!
You write: "I'm scheduled to graduate in a few months"
Is the UW CS Bachelor just 2 years? Your LinkedIn profile states that you started there mid-2023, so you've been there for just 1.5y. What am I missing?
You can definitely bang out all the major requirements in 2 years if you don't need any gen ed classes (e.g. community college or other transfer credits). ~18 class-quarters of requirements, 3 classes/quarter => 6 quarters. Possibly as short as 4-5 quarters if you can manage a higher courseload.
Note: this isn't true for some universities that limit transfer/AP credits. I remember some of my classmates not taking their AP tests senior year of high school because of it.
We're specifically talking about UW CSE here.
Wow, really? So you just pay for a year instead of 4 years? Why do people not do that more?
Because you have to go to a high school that offers special courses, you have to be willing to work much harder than the average student, and you have to know about this trick when you're like 15yo and comprehend how much $$$ and time it's going to save you in the long run.
I fortunately did take advantage of this, and so did my wife. Thought we took advantage of it so we could do cheap study abroad and not have to take any courses toward our degree plan (indeed, I actually earned a second degree in a completely unrelated field while doing my study abroad)
But to be clear, this was because I took every advanced class offered at my high school and took other courses at the local community college instead of hanging out with my friends during lunch, etc. It was a constant gaming of the system to eventually get the results I wanted.
In Washington, high school students can enrol in community college courses through their school, and count them for both high school and college credit.
The critical part is getting all the non-exciting stuff done at community college. There’s a useless cultural construct we have that says that CC is for a lower tier of student. Obviously this is absolute poppycock, since paying $2000 a year for college vs $20,000 only proves that you don’t like pissing away money. It’s not like English 112 is taught by world-class professors at Stanford or UW. It’s taught by some random TA. But many types of people (even myself) felt pressure to “attend a 4-year school” right from the start.
The best argument for it actually is purely social — community colleges (for no real reason though) don’t have dorms, so the ‘commuter school’ experience can be socially isolating, whereas for outgoing types mixing with all your fellow freshman in a dorm can be very socially rewarding and help establish major friendships. I think they should add on-campus living to community college.
You can double up on a lot in high school (AP, IB, dual enrollment) or CLEP out of a good number of GenEd classes, but not everybody has the access and support they need to pull that off. There's potential value in going to college (as in _being in college_) that isn't strictly measured in credit hours as well.
Oh absolutely, most of the value is being there not in the credit hours. At Cambridge Uni you can't just condense the time for a BA, no matter how brilliant you are. You spend time 3y on learning. If you're fast, you just learn more.
You still need the gen ed credits from somewhere. And you have to actually get in to the major, which is hard for UW CSE (desirable major with limited spots).
You normally pay per credit, so not quite, and also that way you'll have lower grades, fewer chances to get internships, and make less connections.
UW charges the same fixed credit rate for 10-18 credits/quarter then adds significant per-credit fees above 18 to explicitly discourage super high courseloads.
Yep, pretty common, at least they allow it though - mine wouldn't let you take such a courseload unless you had a stellar academic record, and they would require grades significantly above average to recognize equivalent classes from lower education.
> and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
They've already demonstrated that they won't, so faith is misplaced
> the way they handled it makes me just want to walk away.
Assuming you mean the project, not your degree, that sounds reasonable but from your description it also sounds like they aren't willing to let you do that. Hence the advice to at least talk to a lawyer.
The way that the leadership will make it right in the end is VIA YOUR LAWYER.
Without a lawyer they have no reason to do anything. You paid a lot to graduate, it is nothing short of foolish to squander that investment by forgoing legal representation while they try to extort you.
Don’t have any more unrecorded conversations with them. They are playing hardball and you are pretending that everything is a-ok, when it clearly isn’t.
Also, treat email conversations as “unrecorded” if they’re using your university email address. Make sure to download a copy of all email correspondence to a storage device outside the control of the university.
This is really important, they can delete emails. And if they do, that's one more point for your case.
It seems reasonable to at least attempt to resolve the situation by emailing someone higher up than whichever random bureaucrat put a hold on his account before immediately jumping to hiring lawyers.
The lawyer emails someone higher up, otherwise the higher up will simply smash the hammer harder to protect against liability. Showing up without representation here is a mark of unseriousness.
Adult businesspeople always have lawyers do the fighting for them; if you don’t it says more about you than the fight.
Not necessarily. The more damage you do to someone, the higher the potential liability. Smart business people usually know that de-escalating is often the best choice.
You may want to check what the conditions are on transferring credit from other schools.. In some schools you only need a limited portion of credit from your own school and a sign off from an appropriate professor for equivalences.
If UW is anything like my state university your advisor should be able to access the system on your behalf.
This is blackmail - it’s wrong. It’s fairly obvious you can’t trust them, at the very least ask a lawyer.
I always thought that anything you create belongs to them in perpetuity. Stanford has the same rule which allowed them to own PageRank
I don't think that applies for students who are not paid by the university?
IANAL, obvs, but their is a consideration, the provision of education, so a contract can be formed. AFAIK, IPR clauses are standard (but I know nothing about this jurisdiction).
Wait! What!
I sort of understand the part they wanted you to shutdown the website. Maybe its a copyright issue, even though the website only showed dummy courses.
I don't understand why they'd not let you sign up for classes to graduate, it seems like you were operating in good faith, and a University would lean towards the student. It doesn't seem like there was any indication of monetization here.
I'm definitely flabbergasted by their stance on asking you to build the same feature as an extortion mechanism.
I've lived in WA for ~9 years, and held UW in high regard as I often interact with graduates at my day job. But, this leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Hope the University admin that is involved in these series of decisions, receive health as more leadership gets involved with this going viral.
Take the project, do your finals and then throw the project again if you don't want to take the legal course.
Please retain council.
Academic work, including for undergrad classes, is often owned by the institution you are enrolled at. Presumably, they already own the IP.
Stop posting anything publicly until you’ve retained and consulted with an attorney.
You may wish to consider deleting this comment. You can always repost it later after you lawyer up.
This is just regular old extortion
your intuition is correct.
your creativity is correct.
enjoy your spotlight.
are JD Kaim and Ed Kaim related?
This is absolutely ridiculous... shame on UW. Their quid pro quo offer is ethically very wrong.
My wife works at a major public university and fights with antiquated software and business systems all day long. The amount of IT system bloat and 'village-idiot dumb' processes for managing course offerings, course catalogs, class schedules, etc. is pretty bad at a lot of universities.
? that is so ridiculous that it almost triggers my BS detector
> as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
They are actively trying to fuck you over- stop hoping and having faith that it will somehow magically work out. Your degree is at stake. You need to escalate, and that starts with talking with a lawyer.
Right now, you are being the worst kind of naive.
What? You didn't even do anything? This is extortion.
I for one would absolutely donate to your legal defense (offense?) fund. This isn't right and whoever decided to approach this in this manner should lose their job and never have an authoritative position in higher ed ever again.
Gut reaction is this feels like petty and vindictive retaliatory behavior hiding behind an official façade.
When I read your initial post I figured it was knee jerk reaction, and like many no’s was only the start of the conversation.
Now it sounds like you’ve got some sociopaths on the line. I would gather information and fish them to get very specific about their request and threat, then kindly turn it around on them. Be prepared to go above their heads all the way to the board if necessary.
You need a lawyer. They will 100% bully the F out of you to get what they want. Do not assume good faith.
This is an awful PR situation for UW. Whoever thought they could hold a students ability to graduate hostage in exchange for _free_/slave labor is fucking insane. The people behind that decision need to be publicly named and subsequently fired.
In addition to raising hell on the public front. I would be consulting with attorneys to discuss what can be done in court to compel the UW to do the right thing.
Don’t be naive and think uni leadership will “make it right in the end”.
"Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate."
Sue the ever living hell out of them. They are forcing you to work for them unpaid. Call multiple labor boards and drag them into UW immediately.
Withholding your ability to attend school so that you can labor for another free of charge is more generally known as human trafficking.
Lawyer up
if anything, thanks for letting us all know that University of Washington blackmails their students in bad faith. hopefully this will save at least one other kid from being taken advantage of like you are clearly being and go to a superior institution that doesn't do these kinds of things.
@jdkaim do the project as a way to say you're sorry, give them the work uncompensated (effectively they're charging you the value of your degree, I'd assume that's not trivial).
Once you have your degree, you can go from there, hire a lawyer, sue for uncompensated labor (something about minimum wage laws, I think, requires they pay you), and so on. Maybe even some emotional distress.
But hey, IANAL and ya gotta do what you think is right.
This is probably the right answer. Similar to "dont fight the police on the street, fight them in court". Can even quiet-quit during the project if you need to.. software can take an awfully long time to build..
Also, track your time during the work. And keep all correspondance. Paper trail, paper trail, paper trail.
Do not have faith. Once they pick some dumb track, they will stick with it until they either lose legally or lose in the court of public opinion (donors). See also: Oberlin.
If this is a one-party state, record those calls!
Best thing to do is to lure them into overestepping themselves in writing, and the extortionate demand that you work for free is heading in that direction.
you enrolled in a predatory institution designed to indebt workers forever. theyre not there for your interest. social media blast, leave, and potentially litigate.
That's concerning. I can see why IT wouldn't be giving API keys to random students. Who on the uni side is doing this?
given the type of UW blackmail you need to contact a lawyer to protect your right to an education finishing your studies....do not delay that step
> [The university will not defacto expel me at the end of the quarter if] I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
Holy shit. Do you have this in writing? If you do, transfer the records to several places that YOU control... don't rely on University-controlled systems to keep this information safe.
If they relayed this to you verbally, and you are in a one-party-consent state, did you record the conversation?
If your report is reasonably accurate, they are absolutely NOT acting in good faith and absolutely WILL NOT act in good faith. If you have records of their statements, you should take those records to a lawyer and ask for advice.
> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
don't be daft. they are already blackmailing you for free labour.
Bro, fuck them. Put the site back online.
> They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter.
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
This is so outrageous that I have trouble believing it. If it's true, you need to immediately take this to the media.
> I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
Yikes, they're going to walk all over you.
not a laywer, but this sounds like you are being dicked.
Uh yeah you should get a lawyer, they are threatening to kick you out unless you do work for free?? That’s crazy! How can they justify this?
Most universities have sliding scale (down to zero fee)law services available for students.
Things like tenant rights, criminal cases, immigration, consumer, employment, wills, health care directives, power of attorney, name change, etc.
You should make use of them. Especially if your educational career is being impacted “a hold” (whatever that means). If it was coursework project then your professor also should have some sway if he or she has tenure and any integrity
Good luck
bro what money do you think you are holding on to? Just let it go and graduate or move onto another school. How will they "make it right". They just want you to stop messing with the reg system. Its their school not yours. For better or worse. Hell, you chose them.
> I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum.
Never do this.
You are on the right, they are on the wrong. This makes sound like you are doing something wrong.
Standing your ground on what you believe is right - technically, legally, ethically, ideology - would be what make you very successful in the long term.
Focus on graduating.
Accept that you have lost, take the offer.
It's unlikely that you will have to do more than attend a few meetings and write some emails, possibly provide some code samples. The goal is likely not a complete working solution but to punish you for unwittingly countering someone's reason for needing a large team (and therefor you are threatening their pay).
Quite possible the desired solution here might be you agreeing to say that a proper solution can't work safely with the university systems for some made up reason.
His (presumed) dad commented this on LinkedIn:
> I have seen all the emails now and it's as bad as described. I thought there might be some hyperbole but the "University Registrar and Chief Officer of Enrollment Information Services" is clearly saying "work with us to build this for free or you're not graduating". They even specify that he needs to set up the meeting "well before registration opens on February 13th for spring quarter 2025" because they're not going to let him continue otherwise.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edkaim_github-jdkaimhuskyswap...
Until they post evidence, legal counsel comments on it, or its reported by a news agency its a bit moot. I personally would have gone full nuclear and posted all evidence to put pressure on the school already by now. If I'm already defacto expelled I'd have nothing to lose by putting this on blast.
Its weird that he hasn't posted anything given the retaliation he is receiving, hence why its hard to take completely seriously.
This is an internet discussion forum; everything is moot.
Assuming the eventual heat death of the universe is real, everything is moot! :D
"Only a fool would take anything here as fact"
Not weird at all if lawyers are involved.
Presumably lawyers are not involved on the UW side, because if they were, they'd be freaking out at their client's blatantly illegal behavior and telling them to immediately unlock registration.
Jeez, somebody not going immediately full mental meltdown fully public for reason X Y Z should be immediately dismissed. You have 0 info about him or his life, so it would be wiser to stop passing clueless judgements.
OP wanted this scrutiny and is using it to advertise himself to employers. Any analysis, criticism, or doubt is what he asked for. He should "show receipts" (emails at least) if he wants people to take his word for it.
While I agree that by going public on LinkedIn and HN scrutiny is fair game, he might still not want the scrutiny and/or be surprised by it.
I guess we could chalk up any naive misconception of what would/could happen on his part to his inexperience and youth - but not his father, a founder with a long career, who just "stoked the flames".
At this point - especially considering the overwhelming and almost consensus opinion in this thread yesterday - if they haven't shut up and talked to a lawyer yet, it MUST be a deliberate decision
Looks like brainrot has reached HN too. "0 info about their life" is exactly the reason why one cannot be certain about their story - neither trust nor mistrust is warrented yet.
The only clueless judgment is one that doesn't ask for evidence.
I wish they would post the emails. It's all hearsay still.
Email text can be easily faked too, there's really no reason to weigh them higher than the story other than they can be slightly tricky to fake the style and verbiage you might expect to see from that type of email.
Can be faked but that takes effort and raises the stakes. Now you'd not just misrepresent, you'd also be forging stuff.
We could then also discuss whether the text was credible or had some signs of being forged. Data is always good to have even if it could be fake.
Raw emails though are potentially verifiable if there's say, a DKIM header.
Agreed, but at least it's more than one person's interpretation that's put their reputation on the line, even if it's a family member.
It is hard to take the student's post as anything but feigned innocence at how this solution could be viewed as registration tampering & abuse. I can imagine ignorance before the school reacted, but failing to grasp their position after receiving a expulsion threat shows either a major deficit of cognitive empathy or dishonesty.
This makes me skeptical of any follow-on claims or discussion.
It's worth noting that the dad also gave his son a job at his company while the kid was still in high school. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does show that the father is heavily invested in this kid and willing to act affirmatively to give him a leg up, which means I personally would not count this as additional testimony backing up the story.
The dad's testimony doesn't make it less likely to be true, but it's not high quality evidence in favor.
Edit: I'm fine with downvotes, but do everyone a favor and explain why you disagree. It's a bit disheartening that every comment that doesn't go full on pitchfork gets squashed with no justification other than 'failure to light a torch'. We can be better than that.
I'm pretty sure that the (presumed) father would be heavily invested in his kid, regardless of whether or not he gave him a job while he was in HS.
Certainly we should look at someone else's (especially a relative's) corroboration of the story with some skepticism; ideally we could see the emails themselves.
But really, OP should contact a lawyer ASAP.
Right, but I do think that the fact that he gave his son a job in high school makes his testimony even more unreliable than a typical parental relationship. Maybe the kid really is that good, but it's more likely that the dad was willing to sacrifice a bit of his company's time to support his son. That's not a decision that every father would make—not even every supportive father—so I think it's relevant here.
> Maybe the kid really is that good, but it's more likely that the dad was willing to sacrifice a bit of his company's time to support his son.
I haven't looked to see what position the son has at his father's business or the nature of the business itself so I can't comment on specifics. I will say, however, that it isn't uncommon for parents to employ their kids under the table for below market wage commensurate with their lack of experience. If a job gets half done for a quarter of the cost (no taxes, benefits, etc) then for many people it's a win, not to mention that the employer/parent has a captive employee and the employee/kid has early job history and walking around money.
It's also not uncommon for many parents to employ their kids over the table at exactly or above market rate and let the kid develop experience and get paid at the expense of the parent's other employees. This is legal in most cases, but that doesn't mean that every parent would do it—I personally would steer well clear of this kind of arrangement to avoid even the appearance of nepotism.
With either type of arrangement, I think it does tell you something about the parent-child relationship, which in turn does influence how you should take the parent's testimony.
> at the expense of the parent's other employees
rather at the expense of the business owners, which may well be the parent themselves? (ok fine the other employees could have equity in the business, but other than that)
I've been at companies where the owner prioritized their family over the business and the other employees. It's a sucky place to work.
Sucky, sure, but entirely within the moral and legal rights of the owners to do so.
Seems like a normal and expected parental relationship to me. I would be suspect of the fathers that didn't do so.
Someone else pointed out that the framework OP used in the project is the creation of his dad as well: https://github.com/SharpLogic/LightNap
I didn't downvote you, but only because I can't downvote.
This comment is so out of touch with human family norms and morals that I do think it detracts from the overall discussion.
Totally fine to say "uh guys, it's the kid's dad, not exactly an unbiased party", but to suggest that a father using his resources to raise his son is an indication of a lack of integrity shows that you have a poor or distorted grasp on how the human world works (and should work).
You’re being downvoted for poor critical thinking in this case, which led you to write a comment that doesn’t add to the conversation.
Of course the father is “heavily invested” in his son. That comes from decades of raising him, diapers, dinners, driving and him around, and probably also sharing 50% of his genes.
It's less a lack of critical thinking and more an overabundance of cautious wording to avoid unnecessary offense.
I'm suggesting that this father may have engaged in nepotism once before, which makes me question his integrity. Not every father does that, so it's more relevant than just "of course, it's the dad".
I phrased it cautiously because I don't know the full story, but the pieces are there and I think it's worth pointing them out.
I think people are also reacting to presumption that [hiring ones son[ is a [negative] mark on integrity or honestly. Many (most?) people don't draw that as a logical conclusion.
What does `this` refer to in your comment? If "hiring his son," I don't think anybody is indicating that it is a mark of integrity or honesty.
Thanks, I edited to clear that up. Yes, I meant hiring his son. I think loliander was explicitly claiming that it impacts their honesty and credibility.
>I'm suggesting that this father may have engaged in nepotism once before, which makes me question his integrity.
Oh, then I misunderstood that too, yes. I read "mark of integrity" as being a strictly positive thing. Your edit looks good though.
Helping your own son in life is not nepotism, nor does it indicate a possible lack of integrity.
It's absolutely a mistake and a lack of critical thinking to believe that any given father would go out of his way and put his own reputation at risk for his son. Some would. I don't know if it's even a majority. But plenty of fathers would not, even if they're present in their son's life.
Edited for clarity.
Not in western culture.
Sure, there are no absolutes, but as a rule you can count on parents being partial to their children. It’s definitely a majority — not even close.
> a favor and explain why you disagree
Unrealistic request. 95% of the point of downvoting is to give people the option to do their bit to bury things that they can't logically refute or easily debunk or whatever. The other 5% is spam/troll mitigation.
I went to UW a decade ago, and back then it was pretty common knowledge that you don't fuck with software and the class registration system. Registering for classes was really competitive and they were really strict about making sure that no one had an edge over anyone else by being able to write code. There were plenty of rumors of people being expelled for using scripts to try to get the classes they wanted right when they opened. I also believe they forbid or at least frowned on students "trading" registrations, because they didn't want even more people trying to sign up for high value classes and trading them as a commodity.
So at least back when I went there, basically any CS student could have told you that this website was a horrible idea that is sure to get you in trouble.
I am somewhat surprised issues of scripting and trading even exist in the registration system. Staggering enrollment times over a few days, with new waves every 20 minutes or so, mostly solves scripting issues since you are only competing with a fraction of the student body now. Giving courses waitlists once they are full, instead of allowing people to just directly register once a spot frees up, makes trading impossible since if you could trade you could have just registered for the course anyways.
I understand that the registration system is probably old and tied up in tons of just as old management software, but if the university really cared the solutions should be there.
When I went there it was staggered, which causes this desire for spot trading - seniors register first, so if you are an freshman/sophomore/junior, you beg a senior to register a spot in a class you want then coordinate them deregistering just before you register for the class. This automated that and at scale could be a big issue.
So, for context, UW's registration system runs on, like, a single 1980s VAX.
The school I attended in 2010 had a system like this as well. Awful backend with a simple, but still awful, web interface to talk to it. There was rumor you could telnet in and use an actual text interface, but I never saw it.
The system was replaced a few years later with an Oracle PeopleSoft implementation. Everybody hated it more.
I didn't know VAX had web APIs.
Do you know that software can be used to build a wrapper layer around other software?
It's much easier to build a gateway API for a legacy system than to extend it. Not disagreeing with you. Honestly, though, software systems for academic institutions are ridiculously complicated, because they are essentially a student portal, a school, a sales organization, a rules engine, etc. etc. all wrapped up into one and interconnected in ways that aren't obvious on the surface.
That is confidently incorrect
Punishing people is easy. Changing process is hard, especially when you're a dysfunctional bureaucracy.
I went to school about 20 years ago and we had staggered online registrations. Surprised the best solutions haven't propagated further.
Pretty much every schools uses staggered registrations to allow upper class men or even athletes the ability to get classes they need.
Non-transferable class registrations decided by lottery would solve this. Publicly visible, physical random number generation is important of course.
With pre-registration you can also get an idea of demand in advance, instead of having to post-hoc schedule additional classes (or concert tour dates, or airline flights, or PS5 units, or… etc.)
Non-transferability means the lottery is continuous. As soon as anyone relinquishes their class, the lottery will have to run again to reallocate. You could do this daily.
This is a technical solution that works but it overlooks the cultural side of a resource allocator wanting their resource to generate hype and demand, build up to the Big Event, and then sell out in “record time”. I can understand that a big part of University marketing is to try to seem as popular and oversubscribed as possible, even if I don’t agree with it.
Finally of course, the public RNG bit feels like the most interesting. A giant continuous dice tumbler in the middle of UW’s Red Square? The tumbler feels easy, but how would you make a physical ledger to record the dice rolls automatically?
The idea of transferring registration from one student to another without input from the university is bananas to me. But only slightly more stupid than not having waitlists which is the only reason that exists in the first place.
My alma mater let people register in descending order of number of completed credits with a C or better (e.g. 2.0), and then GPA, in waves. Same with dorm sign ups which were required for everyone but seniors. It worked out great and professors always had enough slack to let special cases in if they felt compelled to.
Making it random seems like a bad idea to me. It's "fair" only insofar as randomness is fair. For high-demand classes isn't it more "fair" that people who will graduate sooner and/or have done better in their classes thus far should have the first opportunity to get those classes?
I really like the point you make about randomness being bad as well, albeit in different ways. I’m not sure if I agree on the prior-grade route, not for freshmen at least but that does make a lot of sense for the later years.
Overall, randomness, like democracy, might be the least worst option.
If they didn't want people trading registrations why not just... not allow them to trade reservations? I can't trade plane tickets, and that isn't because of some implied threat.
The "trading" is all out of band, the system only sees one person drop their registration and another person fill the slot.
When someone drops a class, the opening becomes available immediately, so you coordinate a time well after the registration rush has died down for one person to click "drop" and the other to refresh the page and click "register". At least that's how it worked when I did it 20 years ago. It was relatively common in the Greek system not to "trade" a class for a class but rather a class for a few beers or the like: prior to registration, if you were an underclassman who really needed to get into a class next quarter that you knew filled up quickly, you'd find an upperclassman (who get access to the system earlier) who was eligible for the class you needed and wasn't full on credits to grab a slot, then a couple days before classes started, you'd have them drop and then grab it for yourself.
At that time (early 2000s), polling bots weren't common, but there were rumors, so people doing this got more careful and actually sat next to each other with their laptops to coordinate the drop and add instead of just picking a time or date.
I feel like if the university has an issue with it, this could all be fixed by just adding course waitlists. Which is how it was handled at both my undergrad and grad university
So have a queue?
polling bots were absolutely common by 2000
It's an unintended consequence of the system being so laughably out of date and so poorly designed it doesn't support waitlists.
Allowing infinitely large waitlists for a given class - which even in the most convoluted legacy system imaginable is not that big of a challenge - and trading disappears overnight.
It's not a problem for the university directly, and fixing it would cost money, so there's no incentive to do it. Gotta make sure there's enough money to keep paying the president $76,000 every month, after all.
it's a disgrace that a university administrator makes over a million a year... in a public school to boot
or you know, offer more of the desirably classes, or charge extra for them, or give people "fun bucks" to register for classes and the more desirable ones cost more fun bucks
High-demand classes are bi-modal. The left side of the distribution is the low-level intro and survey courses. I went to a very heavily pre-med undergrad with a total enrollment of about 1,500 where the intro Chemistry course had two 100-150-person survey courses with multiple TAs. Charging more for these is pretty stupid. The answer is to offer more of them if you have the physical space, the professor(s), and the TA(s) to do it, which you don't always have.
The right side is the 5- or 6-person high level classes offered every other year or something. Usually, but not always, these are in demand because professors are not fungible at this level and they're probably taught by a popular or famous professor. I took one of these at my school taught by a former cabinet secretary, just four of us seniors and him talking about politics for 4 hours every week. You can't just offer more of these; if you're teaching one class every other Spring you're unlikely to seriously consider changing that to two Fall and two Spring classes every year.
god forbid schools get more desirable instructors when, in a class of 100 students, they're getting paid close to $200k in revenue if they're charging $600 per credit hour, which is on the low side, and making hundreds of millions per year off of endowment investments
You'll get no argument from me on higher ed misspending the majority of their funds. You could remove 80% of all US higher ed administration from the workforce forever and I'm convinced there would be no noticeable negative impact on the economy. IMO it's one of the careers with the largest gap between how important the people in it think they are vs. how much of a real impact they actually have.
I was just pointing out that there are two competing reasons why classes end up with long waitlists or people who graduate having never had the chance to take them so it's not a simple "Do _________" and it's fixed.
UW cs student - most current cs students would still know that this would get you in trouble.
it's almost like universities are about controlling an artificial limited access to knowledge than about knowledge uh.
That's what bothers me the most about this. The reason this is even an issue in the first place is because universities are aren't adequately providing what the students want.
So you want to study, say, engineering.
First you have to apply and get admitted to the university, and many people aren't admitted. The acceptance rate I can find for UW is 54% in-state, 46% out of state.
Then the university tells you that if you want to study engineering, you have to study a lot of other non-engineering things it feels like you should study. All of which are pretty costly and time consuming.
You might have to take courses in things you already know, because there are few courses you can test out of and the universities limit how many credits it can bring over.
Then on top of this, the universities don't provide anywhere near enough adequate quality classes for students, which is the whole reason why there's this level of demand in the first place.
Not only do they not provide enough, they know they don't provide enough, so their response is since it's "really competitive" they need to be "really strict about making sure that no one had an edge over anyone else." It's not about making sure students needs are being met, even for classes that the university is forcing on them. It's about restricting students, so that they suffer a roughly equal amount from the university's failures.
The attitude of the universities seems to be that since they're the only game in town, students have to suffer through all of this. Imagine a system where students could take classes from anywhere they want, and then could get a degree just by passing assessments at the university. I imagine the number of people paying huge amounts of money for inadequate classes would plummet.
Having admissions is an objective good though. Yes there's some gatekeeping aspects to it. But smart people want to be around smart people. I went to a school that I got into easily and if I could change one thing that I did in HS I would apply to more schools and try to go to the one that I barely got into.
Study other things is good too. I went to a liberal arts school for this. I studied politics, chemistry, computer science, Chinese language, South African history, Russian literature. Of course me knowing how to count to ten in Mandarin or being able to talk about the influences of Dostoevsky never helped me get a job but being well-rounded is an objectively Good Thing. I don't think you should have 60 credits of gen eds but a semester or two worth of non-STEM classes over 2-3 years is not going to hurt anyone.
It's not the university's fault that the taxpayers refuse to fund a larger school.
Edit per reply: $1M/yr for the President is less than $50/student/year. Not funding more classes for students.
The president of UW makes $912,000 a year. They have plenty of money, they're just not allocating it on the things they should be.
It's funny how a perfectly organized crime is not crime at all
I'd heard of people writing these kinds of scripts but never heard of anyone getting expelled for it (ca. 2010).
At my University, scripts like these are pretty much universal.
We even have an alumni-run site that scrapes the registration platform's API for the details of every course to provide a better UI interface.
It even has a tool to generate an AutoHotkey script so students can insta-register for all their classes seconds after registration opens up for them (it's usually a mad rush at midnight when course registration opens for freshman/sophomores as they all compete for the remaining course slots left after seniors and juniors have already registered).
Seems inane an institution would crack down on it.
We even have another alumni-run site that does nothing but FOIA the average GPA of all courses from every professor; While I can't imagine the university is thrilled about it, as it's completely legal they haven't tried to pressure the creators to shut it down afaik.
> Seems inane an institution would crack down on it.
Mad rushes to register requiring people to use automations like that sounds like a bad system to me, and something the university should be trying to address. That said, rather than a crackdown on tools, it’d make more sense to implement a harder-to-game system like spreading registration across a long period and assigning students to have their access unlock at a random time during the period. My college had time-slot (in person!) appointments like that 20 years ago.
If the university offers an API then it's not a "scrape". If you're describing unauthorized use of an API then you've disclosed a possible CFAA violation, not web scraping.
I have no idea how they do it, and I don't care if they're breaking the CFAA; Neither are my problem.
Though they do claim to obtain at least some of their information using an API, so if it's the word "scrape" you take issue with in the post, perhaps "queries" is a better fit.
> they were really strict about making sure that no one had an edge over anyone else by being able to write code.
Or you know, they could have just improved their registration system so this wouldn't be an issue... But hey, I'm sure UW raises their tuition every year for good reasons and the money is well spent.
This is so bizarre to me that I'm not sure if I understand it correctly. They soft lock him out of UW system which will get him expelled for having an idea for an app for trading spots in classes and implementing a demo with fake data and using the token they provided him with to download data that is public already? And then they try to blackmail him with a promise of restoring system access to do unpaid compelled work for them?
That’s just how colleges are. I once reported to my alma mater that a somewhat obscure (but obviously public) link seemed to trigger the download of a zip of student details for no discernible reason (I think it was a WIP site), and they immediately threatened to call the FBI on me. I just sort of laughed it off, but I decided that was the last time I was going to initiate any sort of contact with them if I didn’t absolutely have to.
Which is the policy I followed when I found that they had stored one of their LDAP admin passwords in a world readable file on the CS servers.
Wasn't a government agency rendering citizen SSNs client-side and when someone discovered it, they went after them? Wouldn't be surprised if the anti-DRM part of the DMCA is used to persecute these non-crimes.
I think you're thinking of this case [1] from Missouri where a reporter notified the state that teacher SSNs were exposed, and the Governor went ballistic. Luckily, it seems like the local law enforcement set the record straight.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-crime-educati...
I never figured out if the governor was that inept that he was truly convinced the person was a hacker despite every tech professional's opinion, or if he was merely doubling down on the hacking accusations to try to save face.
Missouri Governor was the one going after them for viewing the source of a public webpage.
I imagine governments tend to be the same way, though my only direct experience here is that I don't report anything and nothing bad happens. The funny thing to me is that the discovery of these issues is not what triggers retaliation, but the audacity of reporting them.
Were I personally impacted, I would just submit information to the media as an anonymous whistleblower to get it fixed.
Really? If you’re personally impacted then surely you don’t want the media bringing attention to an open vulnerability where anyone can steal your data.
I’d opt for silence in this case and hope that some future update patches the bug (accidentally or otherwise).
Depends on the impact. In some cases you do, so a class action lawsuit gets some traction.
Yes, that was in MO. Their idiot governor threatened the journalist that discovered it with prosecution.
An investigation by the Missouri State Patrol and a MO county later determined that the executive branch screwed up and leaked the SSNs and that the reporter committed no crime.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-governor...
It's CFAA (computer fraud and abuse, aka hacking/cracking) not DMCA/anti-DRM
RIP Aaron Swartz
Isn't it weird how universities are so hostile towards their students? Some professors are genuinely interested in developing students and are great, but many faculty and administrators - and the overall tone of the schools - are draconian.
Universities are businesses, they aren't institutions of learning. Students are on the "liability" side of the balance sheet. Students who stand out could accrue massive costs.
Professors? The problem is tenure.
Research universities have plenty of professors who are there to do research. But they often still have a teaching responsibility. For those professors, teaching students is a mandatory thing they only do so they can keep their job doing what they actually want: research.
Those professors aren't great teachers, and I think we shouldn't blame them for it. Instead we should blame the system that forces them to do something they aren't good at.
This is a problem but it's not really related to the issue of the harsh reaction of college administrations to exposing problems, the examples mentioned in this thread and in the original article are all capital A Administration responses, a group completely separate from the professors. Some professors are involved in admin work but the vast majority of admin work is done by employees who neither teach nor research.
Student web service in question: https://ws.admin.washington.edu/student/swagger/index.html
FERPA was probably a big factor in UW’s initial response to ask that the site be taken down. Institutions are all about CYA now.
The bit about blackmail seems a bit far fetched. I’d like to see the correspondence between UW and this individual. The entire story is certainly plausible but as other have pointed out, there are a number of inconsistencies.
The following has been added to the "Tampering and Abuse" section of the UW Registrar's Policies & Procedures page in the last day:
> Additionally, the creation of any service that enables any of the above behaviors is strictly forbidden and constitutes a violation of this policy.
Worth noting that the administrative code is probably more important, here's some relevant sections:
WAC Aiding, assisting, and attempting: https://app.leg.wa.gov/WAC/default.aspx?cite=478-121-113
WAC Computer abuses: https://app.leg.wa.gov/WAC/default.aspx?cite=478-121-117
Registrar before: https://web.archive.org/web/20241208123609/https://registrar...
Registrar after: https://web.archive.org/web/20250109203004/https://registrar...
Why would the school admin go nuclear over a request to integrate with the registration system, a system that is clearly intended to be used by applications:
> “The Student Web Service gives your application access to information in the Student database such as course data, registration data, section data, person data, and term data (general academic data).”
It doesn't make any sense. Was there something left out of the story? Do they offer this web service as a honeypot to find and expel ambitious software developers?
Everybody knows you have to be a drop-out to become successful in tech. This is basically their way of identifying potential entrepreneurs and helping them to drop out.
I laughed out loud. Thanks!
Independent self-starter types that respond creatively to strict rules don't like schooling. They often don't bother to start university so never drop out.
A few of the smartest people I personally know left school at 15 - they reacted badly to school restrictions and just wanted to just do something (not study) and often left home early too.
There are strict privacy laws (e.g. FERPA) which university administrators are terrified of violating and getting sued over.
Meanwhile, most university "enterprise" software is a festering pile of shit.
I'm very surprised by the extortion attempt, but sadly a massive overreaction doesn't much surprise me.
Something I have noticed about higher education admins is that they hire consultants to do every project
I came to understand that this is because the career positions have such great benefits, often the last bastion of pensions, that these people literally go there to die.
So they take no risks and don’t try anything. They hire a consultant and if it doesn’t work out the blame lies there.
They also get big budgets to implement the consultant solution, which is bloated and terrible, so the department head gets more money every year to support it
My guess is that those integration points are intended to be used by University owned and operated services. Having a service that the University doesn't control wanting to do this would be difficult to get approval. Student data is highly protected (legally), so access to it through another application (where the operators could see other students' data) is problematic.
That makes sense. Now, with that in mind, a reasonable response to OP's request would involve just saying "no". Maybe even politely explain why, but that isn't required.
Yep; that's where the story as-told seems fishy.
Imagine an entire institution where your goal is to minimize the ability for anyone to convince people you were negligent, and you hate your job because it doesn't matter how you do it, you have little control outside of whatever fiefdom and backroom channels you've assembled.
The kind of person who doesn't leave that role tends to be either someone who enjoys accumulating or wielding power, or would have trouble in roles outside of an institution like that.
Now imagine a person who has almost no power just made a public spectacle about something in your camp that you've been not doing for years even though it's been a well known problem because nobody could make you do anything about it.
You're probably going to go into overdrive and try to kill this story, even if it's not because you'll be directly punished in any way from it (because that's very uncommon in academia), but because this person DARED to challenge you.
...at least, that's my perception from years of time around toxic parts of academia (and some less toxic parts, but.)
I'm not saying the story is true, I don't have enough data to comment, but I have absolutely seen enough academics go off the handle from 0 to 11 to buy this as plausible.
I mean, it still doesn't make any sense. From what I can tell, OP never acquired the API keys needed to actually interact with the system. So he literally just made a demo app and asked permission to make it live. Instead of just saying "No" they tried to coerce him into slave labor.
The British have a nice word: "jobsworth".
No bureaucrat is going to say "yes" because the consequences of something going wrong costs them their job while the benefits of things going right are zero.
(For example, a DDoS. The number of times I have accidentally fired a DDoS at an API endpoint is non-trivial. Or it could get so popular that it's a DDoS. etc.)
Yea, I don't understand the response to him here. You can just tell the random student who wants the keys to the student database "no" and go about your day.
It's almost like this one-sided story is leaving some things out.
Victim blaming is not cool. These types of over-the-top legal threats in response to good-faith engagement are extremely common and it's why bug bounties have safe harbor protections.
Nope. Universities are wild and their technology is weak. It’s always been this way.
[flagged]
Please don't cross into personal attack.
No, I do. It was an informal usage; they were requesting access to an internal web service and universities don't give that out to every student who asks.
I have several friends on the administrative side at Universities. The two things you have to realize is that there are an incredible number of administrative staff at Universities and they're extremely territorial. You rocked someone's boat and they got upset. They have a lot of time on their hands because there are so, so many people in administration. Now they're coming after you like it's their job.
I think you're doing the right thing by publicizing this far and wide. Stay calm, cool, and stick to the facts as tightly as possible. When this gets picked up across social media and news media it will start to become a problem for other people on the administrative side of the university who are also territorial (about PR/image) and will take it as their job to fix it.
So be loud, but polite.
I've spent quite a bit of time in academia and was going to post something similar. Universities, no matter how great, are filled to the brim with petty bureaucrats just itching to exert whatever meager power they wield over someone whenever they get the chance.
> So be loud, but polite.
Fully agree. In academia problems don't get fixed until it's more annoying to not fix it. The more attention this gets the more likely a petty bureaucrat above the one responsible for this will realize their day just significantly more annoying and will likely squash it quickly and quietly.
The conflict is so intense because the stakes are so low.
This is so true. My nephew worked at a Starbucks kiosk for a minute and had to deal with the most toxic territorial BS from the women who worked there before he started
I said basically the same thing to him. It’s amazing how bad it can get when you threaten someone’s small stake when that’s all they have.
Reminds me of when I suggested to a college admin that she could automate some scheduling chore. She gave me death stares as if I wanted to take all the food off her plate.
This reflects my experience as well.
> They have a lot of time on their hands because there are so, so many people in administration.
Not so polite take: most of them could be replaced by a 20 line shell script.
Actually, they can't. Their job isn't to do whatever is on the description, their job is to give someone for their boss to have in his little fiefdom.
Lord of the Shell Scripts doesn't ring as fun as having 20 employees, even if the shell scripts do more.
> their job is to give someone for their boss to have in his little fiefdom.
In my friends' case, he didn't really want a little fiefdom or even to be a manager.
The problem was that they made it clear that the only way to get promoted and move up the salary ladder was to become a manager of a team. So by converting his one-person role into a job that had to be done by several people, he could justify hiring a team underneath him and therefore getting a significant raise and better title.
It's weird to hear them describe how everyone seemingly knows the game is broken, but they're open about how it needs to be played.
Yep, pay is directly tied to how many people are under you.
And it should be no surprise that this is how it works. The operational side is hired by the academic side which is even more crazy. It's made up mostly of people who have never had a job outside of school (they went to university and then never left) so it's high school drama all of the time.
In that case, even better: lay off all the subordinates, and replace the boss with a 20 line shell script.
lolz.
Having worked at a university your job isn't to get shit done. Your job is to make managers happy, usually by attending meetings, being knowledgeable, polite and always available. Your manager's job is to inflate headcount for the executives, so their empires grow and their ranking among other executives improves.
People at the higher levels literally use words like empire and fiefdom (of x) to refer to departments instead of the departments name.
The first few years I didn't understand this, so I would suggest automations and process improvements at meetings, my manager was always unhappy with me when I did this. I was literally told once that there was value in a human doing a task when I suggested we automate something that could be done with about 5 lines of code.
Eventually I understood and improved. I would automate some tasks silently and then use the freed-up time to prepare for meetings and generally being a better team member. After starting doing this I frequently got highlighted as one of the top 3 team members.
Note that this isn't limited to universities: Larger headcount's make promotions easier everywhere. A modern trick is to hire remote workers from abroad: I might not need 5 people, but 5 remote devs from Mexico are much more affordable than 5 US employees, and they sure mean one can justify someone in the US that is already here becoming a dev lead.
Weird. I work a university and we love our self-service and process automation. Could be that it's a land-grant university and we don't have an unlimited endowment to blow.
Where I was we had a self-service system as well that the university was very proud of. It's just that a lot of the things you could do on there would create a task for a human on the backend instead of having the computer just do it.
My mother works at a state university as a secretary for about 15 years now. Her job, especially after the pandemic, is pretty much to forward one or two emails a day to her boss. $70k/yr, lush state benefits, pension, all that stuff. The workday is 7 hours officially, but only 3-4 in reality (she comes in a few hours late and leaves a few hours early). 3 days in office, 2 remote. Basically unlimited PTO days too, since they are already generous in allotment and unused ones roll over.
She loves it, obviously. Her boss loves her too, they chit chat all day when together, so she isn't getting laid off. But man, the inefficiency and waste is unreal.
such as?
I feel like if you just piped stdin to stdout you would have a solid start on it
In USSR there was a common saying that "the lower the position, the pettier the bureaucrat"
The English word petty derives from the French petit (small). So that's almost tautological.
> have a lot of time on their hands because there are so, so many people in administration
It shouldn't be difficult to determine why education costs are so inflated, nor should it be difficult to see the obvious solution here.
This problem seems to be fairly well known, but insufficiently scandalous for anyone with power to do something about it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
This is the negative part of bullshit jobs that become harmful to others once their existence starts to be threatened!
Your comment reminds me of this part of Bob Black's 1985 essay "The Abolition of Work": https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolit... "I don’t suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn’t worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Thirty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done—presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now—would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the “tertiary sector,” the service sector, is growing while the “secondary sector” (industry) stagnates and the “primary sector” (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That’s why you can’t go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last sixty years? ..."
While at university I had a similar interaction. When the main university IT services team wanted to roll out a replacement to the student portal with a bunch of irrelevant features I mocked up a simple site with the things we actually wanted on it. Later on I re-implemented our students union website, again providing more useful information, like venue schedules and opening hours.
Both times we came under scrutiny for the possibility that we might be handling student data in ways that the university couldn't control, and mostly, that we might be taking passwords on behalf of users.
The first was just a mockup, and while the second initially had full university auth against their open LDAP server, we quickly removed that in favour of our own auth, because it was very apparent that the password input being on our domain was a dealbreaker for the university.
By doing this, and by communicating carefully about what we were doing and what we were not doing, where the boundaries were, and how we handled data, we managed to win them around to some productive discussions. Most of the people we spoke to on university staff who were involved in this were not at the technical level to be able to understand, for example, having an unsecured LDAP server that we could auth against, and were only interested in the policy of whether we were allowed to do it.
It's a common failure mode of software engineers to assume that because something is not technically disallowed, even though it could be, that it must therefore be allowed. This is not true.
What's not clear with this project is whether the university have a fundamental disagreement with the idea of a student project providing services, or if someone has panicked that a non-approved system might be receiving passwords from students. The former is obviously ridiculous, universities should be open to this sort of innovation, especially from their students. But the latter is understandable and a fairly reasonable response, but one that does need careful handling by the student to navigate well.
It is wild to me that the bulk of responses here seem to take how this is being described by the poster at face value.
As well as the question of interfering with registration, he has also gone about this in a way that causes reputational damage (& UW have probably caused their own, but that's not necessarily relevant here), which I cant imagine they'll take that kindly either.
But I work in a public university in the EU, so my understanding of how these institutions probably operate is likely a little skewed.
Probably pent up rage w.r.t. beurocracy we've all experienced in college?
I agree with you that it seems that there might be something missing from the story.
The standard response and advice of talking to a lawyer I think is still good and stands regardless of how full or truthful the OPs account of the situation is.
I don't personally think that most university staff in the US are out to get people in this way either, so either there is something about the story we are missing, or this is a really big deal and this particular university is out of control.
My experience in university in the US was never this dramatic and I didn't see actions like this taken (but I also never constructed a project of this nature that is directly related to the university beurocracy).
In other words, this is kind of weird in a US context too and I feel the same weirdness about it that you are probably feeling viewing from the EU.
UW has had some pretty bad issues (e.g. systems lab abuse [1], early-entrance programs [2]). Another program I was in had serious issues such as overworking and threatening student eligibility, such that almost all the leadership involved left for other universities. That was never reported more loudly out of fear of retaliation and sheer exhaustion of the students. That being said, it is a large university with many different actors and most of my experiences here have been positive.
[1] https://www.dailyuw.com/news/uw-allen-school-confirms-invest...
[2] https://www.dailyuw.com/news/six-students-accuse-robinson-ce...
The insanity, authoritarian impulse and incompetence of American University admins is very easy to believe for anyone who has interacted with them.
>It is wild to me that the bulk of responses here seem to take how this is being described by the poster at face value.
Because it squared with just about how everyone expects universities to behave based on their own experience
How is he interfering with registration? I assumed all he built was a place to pair students so that they could exchange classes using the university's own system. It seems in principle as much of an interference with the university as a coupon aggregating website is to grocery stores: efficiently spreading information so that people can make better use of the existing resources available to them. In his LinkedIn post, he mentions trying to get read access to courses, not write access.
Interesting. I graduated from the _other_ UW (University of Warsaw) and our uni has course-swapping capability built into the University Study Service System (USOS)[1].
FYI public university education is fully government-funded in Poland (i.e. it is free for students).
1 - https://usosweb.mimuw.edu.pl/kontroler.php?_action=news%2Fde...
I'm from New Zealand, and this kind of stuff isn't a thing where I went (as far as I'm aware). Course enrolments open at some point (everything all at once), and you just log in and fill it out at some point over the multiple months between it opening and the due date for completing it. Some programs have limited admission (with their associated papers being restricted to those enrolled in that program), but limited space at the paper level (as opposed to the course level) and rushing to submit your paper selection just isn't a thing (as far as I'm aware).
A third UW is the University of Wisconsin!
Isn't USOS like nightmare of a system? I've heard of stories that people had to graduate after time, because they failed a subject at first year (!) and they had no chance to sign up for the course in the following years at USOS because someone was always faster.
I'm happy my uni in Poland didn't use it :P
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
I'm really baffled here because the code Kaim published is itself MIT licensed. The university could use it however they see fit after his version, and perhaps make a modified version which they then incorporate in to their system as the 'official' version.
Perhaps this code being public may expose potential flaws (logical, security, etc) which they don't want to have to deal with. Or might even be known flaws they don't want to expose.
I would be really shocked if that part actually happened. Major state universities don’t blackmail random students to write software for them. They make RFQs and send them to companies. There’s a software procurement process. 0 chance some person in the registrars office is taking this persons code off github and deploying it to UW production.
Colleagues of mine at a local university often have students work on projects that get used by various departments. Nothing as big as a registration system, but data reporting UIs, data collection forms, etc. Usually paired with a senior staff member, it gives the students some hands on experience, and helps the dev dept get a bit more done (in theory - in practice, not always).
Taking the OP at face value, someone saying "build us a version of this" doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility, but again... whatever was demoed is already MIT. Absolutely no reason the school itself couldn't build on that (inhouse or out-sourcing).
I'm surprised this is upvoted so much. All we have is a LinkedIn post and a GitHub repo. We haven't seen any of the original emails/writing from UW, not have we heard UW's view.
Am I being overly skeptical here?
Yes, with a completely clickbait intro (given he took the site down after the university warned him, which he said later in his post).
To be fair he follows up the first post saying that the university is holding his future registration hostage unless he builds them a similar website:https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdkaim_github-jdkaimhuskyswap...
Note that in the LinkedIn post he exclusively talks in first person: I developed the project etc.
In fact if you go on GitHub, their project presentation lists a 6 people team: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/117dGuEK98-TwAPGUBijf.... He was on the backend team, but still mentions angular in the LinkedIn post.
Did the others not do anything? Or why is he not giving them credit in the LinkedIn post?
If you look at the commit history and contributors, it's mostly him.
I'd take commit numbers with a grain of salt. Also, I wouldn't call half the commits _mostly_ at all: https://github.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap/graphs/contributors?from...
By that metric, he did half the work. But it still means he completely disregards the other half.
56 commits, +273,244, -7,270 LOC
vs
46 commits, +478, -94 LOC
I think it's safe to say it was mostly him.
Don't get fooled by LOCs.
Out of the 273k LOC added, all but 20k, that is 253k are just from the boilerplate auto-generated copy/paste initialization code: https://github.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap/commit/e9f0df0d5a221b3c7...
Sure he probably did most of the coding, but it's still weird to talk all about I and not mention the other 5 in a single word when they _did_ contribute. Maybe they did testing or other things that are not reflected in LOC, e.g. presentations etc.
I see the point of contention now. Though I don't think we're being fooled by LOC's. You can check the commits from the other contributors, and it's all documentation / adding line breaks. It's unfortunately common at universities for CS projects to be spearheaded by one gungho student with the others only tidying things up for in-class presentations.
It's also not 56 vs 46 commits but 56 vs 63. 46 is the second biggest committee but there are 17 more commits from the other 4 and my initial point was that it was odd for him to not mention the other contributors at all. Even if he did the major part, I would never say I created something if it was a team effort. He lead.
Not just random biloilerplate/framework code either. A framework his dad created. So with this logic his dad did the majority of the project.
His dad? How do you know? One doesn't count React in the LOC so why should one count a boilerplate template? As I said, LOC are not a good proxy.
Update: I see, LightNap is the work of Ed Kaim, surname checks out. https://github.com/SharpLogic/LightNap
I'm mostly looking at lines changed -- 273k is a lot more than 500. But yeah, there can definitely be shady stuff that fudges it.
Out of the 273k, 253k were boilerplate template in the first commit, entirely copy/paste or tool-generated: https://github.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap/commit/e9f0df0d5a221b3c7...
The followup is a bold claim with no receipts. He should share the uni's letter otherwise I won't believe it.
What might have happened is that UW offered that he could keep the website up if he changed the project in such a way a way that the university is happy with it.
We don't know how much escalation has happened already, maybe he gave grounds for UW to not give him the account back because he has indicated he wouldn't back down and try to find a way to get his project to work nonetheless.
I'm not saying the story is true, but the intro is accurate to the story AFAICT. The university is allegedly threatening to expel him if he doesn't build them a website for free.
This does not add up- this is your last term but you’ve only been there a year and a half? The university, who presumably has a professional engineering team making these systems is trying to blackmail an undergrad to reproduce something for free that they also wanted shut down? And you’re marketing this on linkedin in the context of asking for job offers?
Probably a transfer, but lol at professional engineering team. Zero chance. The resignation system is probably outsourced to at best some edu-tech company and at worst is basically the most cursed Sharepoint site that's ever existed.
It’s all in house, UW IT has multiple floors in a 20+ floor building, literally the tallest until very recently in the UW neighborhood.
The registration system is probably mostly still the original 90s code though, it’s very basic, totally custom.
UW CSE actually had its own tech support team, completely separate from UW IT, who also write internal software/manage the computing systems just for CSE. At least, that used to be the case.
I’m an academic and my institution does all such things in house with a real engineering team in the IT department- as well as a UI and visual design team. PIs can also pay them to develop sites for their own labs, etc. This is pretty standard across half a dozen universities I've worked at.
How come there was another project team with the same idea? Did everyone have the same task? I'm confused: https://www.sammybharadwaj.com/huskyswap
Amidst all of the talk about the reported coercion attempt, which is bad, may I also ask something about the bait and switch: so you paid a lot of money to attend a given university and then even though your grades and everything else would in theory allow you to follow a class you can be blocked because of resource constraints that are not advertised as something you would have to contend with when you paid the big ticket tuition fee?
Isn't this the case in most universities?
In most of the world once you signed up and got admitted at an university it is for a specific program, and the defined set of courses for the program you are on is set, some first year medical-school lecture-halls can get very crowded and even nasty, but you're still in.
UW registration weren't really open to criticism or improvement ca. 2009, either. Extremely hostile to student projects that would in any way interact with the registration system.
Having been on the IT side of student registration, it's a major undertaking for the teams involved with thousands of students to be processed in a fairly short window. Downtime of any type during the registration period has a major impact so I'm not surprised that a university is being cautious with a 3rd party system connecting and potentially causing performance or downtime issues.
Thousands is nothing, maybe the code should be written and tested more carefully?
It's worse than that, throwing all 60k students at the registration system at the same second with no automated waitlist is a policy decision.
Registration at my school was a zero stress endeavor because those features are built in and very good in College admin software on the open market, for at least 2 decades.
What is very likely is that UW considers something about staggered enrollment "unfair" or not right for everyone, so prefers the absurd freeforall, and therefore polices any attempt to bypass that freeforall "fairness" as unacceptable.
How does the course-swapping site work? Is there some part that requires users to enter their credentials (email, password) on a web site that is not operated by the university? Is there some part that saves an access token or a refresh token in other place than the web browser?
Is some OAuth2 authentication flow involved so that the university has registered the application and assigned a client id and return URI?
I think the university might have valid security concerns if the application somehow accesses student accounts without valid OAuth2 authorization flow (or equivalent).
Entering login credentials for university on a third-party site is probably forbidden by terms of service for the university site.
Meanwhile in my Russian university, everyone scraped whatever they wanted. As long as you didn't cause any harm or disruption to these systems, no one cared.
There were tests you had to take in a special classroom full of Sun thin clients. You had to register yourself for some time slot(s) to go there. Sometimes you had to go there in like 2 days to meet a deadline but there were no slots available. So, someone made an app that would continuously scrape that page and notify you when a slot for your chosen time is available. Saved my ass a couple times.
The current education is collapsing, universities and colleges are not suitable for the new generations, we need changes in the education system.
I had something similar happen to me, not threaten with expulsion and I kind of deserved it.
This was back in late 1990s, a group I was part of was getting a web site made on the school pages and I wanted to contribute. I ran my mouth about my dislike of the current site (I was a dumbass) and for some reason hosted the site on my local computer in my room which was accessible everywhere on the network. I wasn’t going to run it permanently, I just wanted to showcase it. That got me in some trouble, what I said got back too, I got my room connection disconnected because we weren’t supposed to run servers.
I apologized, obviously disabled the server, and eventually got reconnected.
They got a notice of "Registration Tampering Abuse Policy" for filling out a request form to request data that is available?
Is the request system just a honeypot?
Alleging a violation after he asked for an API key, rather than simply turning him down or saying that he could experiment but that he would need to get agreement before deploying, seems like defamation to me.
It's harsh, but that's not what defamation means at all.
Assuming his narrative is factual they are accusing him of a violation he did not commit and he is now being threatened with expulsion as a result.
True, but accusing him of a violation privately, to him, is not defamation. Accusing him publicly is still probably not defamation. Whether he violated certain terms of service is something that would ultimately need to be decided by a court, so them believing he did so isn't defamation even if they're wrong.
The comments here are almost entirely of one voice: UW bad. Student innocent.
It is not hard to find the policy in question. I quote from the UW Registrar's website, their policy on tampering and abuse of the registration system, as cited in the subject of the email the student received:
> The registration system is provided for the sole express purpose for students to register themselves into sections. Any use of the registration system other than for this purpose is considered abuse of the system. Such abuse includes, but is not limited to, buying or selling one’s seat in a class, holding seats for another student, or otherwise registering for a section that one has no intention of taking. [0]
The student's project, though well-intentioned, is in clear violation of this policy. And it ought to be forbidden. There are plenty of ways this kind of a system could go wrong, including creating incentives to overregister or develop a registration black market, not to mention the technical liabilities of letting a bot talk to the database at bot-speed.
Now, as for follow-up conversations the student and the university have had, we have not seen these emails. We have only heard the student's own summary, which, given the high stakes and personally significant impact, may very well have been editorialized so that the university looks unreasonable and the student reasonable.
I, for one, cannot pass such quick and single-minded judgment as everyone else without seeing these emails.
[0] https://registrar.washington.edu/registration/policies-proce...
Except the policy in question was never actually abused as the student did not receive an API key as requested. A proportional response would be a simple denial for API key and reminder of policy. Not preventing a student from graduating. Unless the student is lying here, this is an outrageous response on the part of UW.
Not necessarily lying, TFA could just be misrepresenting/misunderstanding what happened, without intent. Lying implies intent.
I am a college professor so I am biased but I am extremely skeptical of the poster's version of events.
This is the comment I was looking for!
Note also that the student uses the LinkedIn post to advertise themselves to potential employers. This reduces credibility in my mind as it provides a reason why TFA might benefit from exaggeration/misrepresentation.
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for
That's hardly readable, how could they act like that? I am sad to say it but you need the help of a lawyer and the most backup you'll get the better. The way they presented the case will never get solved in a happy manner. Do not let them get the code and the IP. Keep on!
As a non-student, I received an overzealous takedown request from the University of Washington a decade ago. https://github.com/nayuki/Reference-Huffman-coding/issues/1
Also related: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/295420/how-to-cope-...
I would not call that overzealous? It's not couched in legal language / demands, it fully explains the rationale for the request. Intro CS students cheat all the time, they're very lazy about it, having posted answers as top Google results facilitates that and increases TA burden. (Full disclosure, I was personally acquainted with Whitaker long ago. He was a TA for the intro classes. I think he just sincerely wanted to reduce cheating in the intro UW CS courses.)
It's definitely an overreach, and reflects badly on him and his employer.
If one of my open-source projects got hit with that sort of request, my response would be far less polite.
(Full disclosure: I have taught CS courses before.)
I guess I assumed it was actually written directly to a UW homework assignment, but looking at the repository, I don't actually see any reference to that. So you may be right.
You are so much more polite than I am. Admirable.
I would love to see examples of your sassy writings. Maybe I could learn a thing or two about responding to people.
Note that I've become more cynical in these 10 years that passed. I was, let's say, more charitable with people in the past.
Well, here's the post that made Paul Graham block me on X:
https://x.com/LewisCTech/status/1778912158404997494
Also briefly made me popular on Nigerian Twitter, which was fun :)
Well, I guess there's no point to applying to YC for whoever is working on delve.io
That is hilariously naive.
Particularly in the age of AI, professors might have to go back to the practice of oral exams to have people demonstrate their understanding of an issue. The problem for universities is that means you have to have a lower student:teacher ratio.
Check the date on the issue... it's from 2015 way before (gen) AI was even close to being a thing much less being useful for actual coding.
I know - that's why I said "particularly". I was in college in the era of Facebook being for college students only.
My point was that a professor cannot fault providers of information on the internet for their students' unethical behavior. And if they can't trust their students to do remote assignments, then they should test with more reliable methods like in-person examinations.
Or just any exam where the only thing you're allowed to use is "the mass of cells between your ears", as one instructor I know liked to put it.
The request was in 2015, dawg.
Reminds me of the time my university made headlines!...for attempting to regulate wifi.
My former institution tried that for a few years - nobody actually obeyed it, but at the time I went there, they still made you pay a separate registration fee on arrival each year for internet access in the dorms, so they didn't put in wireless APs there when they covered the campus, and IIRC they tried to use Cisco's "kill nearby APs that aren't ours" setting before the FCC pointed out that would get them shoved in a locker.
Nobody actually got punished, that I recall, for bringing a wireless router, but that was the nominal policy for a number of years before someone successfully got it into the annual tuition rollup so it stopped being necessary.
To my recollection from when I left the school years after that, though, there still wasn't campus wifi reliably accessible in the dorms. (Of course, half of them also didn't have reliable air conditioning in muggy humid summers and would blow breakers if you tried putting window units in, so...priorities.)
I have seen the name pop up before, but I have never actually visited slashdot before. I think it was popular a bit before my time. This link made me heavily reconsider how much "worse" I thought internet discourse had gotten in the past 10 years. It looks like way back in 2004, it was still a bunch of people who didn't read the article before commenting arguing past each other to shout into the void the loudest. I guess that's a bit comforting and a bit sad.
Slashdot was the Hacker News of its day twenty years ago. Imperfect, sure, but a good source of tech news, discourse, and insight. The moderation was community driven and a privilege to participate in. It's also a sad shell of its former self.
But, yeah, lots of people skipping straight to comment too.
Trying to decide if having a slashdot link as a reference implies anything about your age or if I'm just a jaded old fart
Jaded old farts unite?
Sounds like this guy did not even publish or finish the project, but only communicated his intent. The university is clearly persecuting him and he should absolutely talk to a lawyer.
Don’t trust UW. They have a history of retaliating against students when complaints are raised. When faculty misbehave they cover it up and take it out on the student to silence them.
I'm so thankful my university (UVA) didn't have these registration problems. Granted, I graduated in '99, so they might now. But I never had any difficulty getting into required classes. At worst, an email to the prof got me a waiver, and IIRC, I only had to do that once.
It sounds to me like the university is using the threat of expulsion to steal or coerce you into giving over your site. I think you just got the best IRL education ever.
UW's slogan is "Be Boundless". This is the polar opposite of that.
UW has missed a great opportunity to show its current and future students and faculty that innovation is valued there. Their management decision will shutdown the minds of so many brilliant hackers, as we have already witnessed with the OP's decision to back down. I really hope the school can re-evaluate their decision and more importantly, the faculty should support the students, as they are together pursuing the goal of learning by doing. That's what higher education should offer, not conditioning people into rule makers and rule followers.
1st rule of hacking: don't write your freaking name on it!
Pick up a phone and call a lawyer. If any lawyers have already hit you up about this, talk to them.
Oh hey, I got in trouble at my university for trying to make a tool for students too. This was ~15 years ago now...
In my case, they accused me of copyright infringement and trying to destroy the co-op program. I made the case that while I was reproducing some data from the university's website, none of it had creative value and therefore wasn't protected by copyright. (I drew a parallel to an actual court case about reproducing phone book listings.)
I also reached out to some faculty that I was close to for some character references to show that I didn't have malicious intent.
Ultimately, I wasn't expelled or anything too bad. I was required to take a business ethics course, which I actually ended up enjoying.
Good luck!
I don't understand - what could they possibly expel you for?
"abusing the registration system" apparently.
Just a thought: maybe replace the MIT license with something more strict (such as GPL-3) or even an "only private use" license.
“...find partners to trade spots in critical classes after they filled up”.
I am not from the USA and I don’t understand the context. What does “trade spots” mean? Does it mean that if I have registered to course A but not course B and my friend have registered to course B but not course A, we can swap our registered courses in the official registration system?
I assume it means that at the start of the semester or just days before it starts that if class A and B are both full but I am enrolled in class A but wanted to drop it and get in class B and you are in class B and wanted in class A then we could swap enrollments.
Is this swap recognised by the uni administration? I mean, after the swap, are you officially enrolled in class B?
That's that the poster's app would allow. I assume that right now it is like a seat on a plane or something: If I drop there is an opening and it is first come first serve to fill the slot. So there's no way to assure that you get my old spot. But the poster's app would allow that.
But how? The university threatens students with expulsion if they do that!
So, why do they allow people to do it, but expell them for... publicly discussing it? When the university could just, you know, not offer the service!
Attorney here. Get an attorney.
Wait, so the project is bad, but also they want you to re-create it for them for free else they won't let you register? This is some insane chicanery. I agree with the many comments here about getting legal advice.
There's a reason you wake up at 5:50am to copy paste course codes the moment registrations open up!
I wanted to chime in with some advice that also can help in any situation involving long administrative processes. I'm sorry you're going through this and I really hope some of this can be helpful.
- Write stuff down! A paper trail is helpful both to prevent hearsay and keep your own timeline of events in check. Recency bias and the like are too common in stressful situations.
- Remember that you are one (1) human who needs food, sleep, and water.
- Reach out to the Ombud (at the HUB), professors, and other administrators you may know. Even within one department there can be mixups -- nevermind when university-wide policies (such as registration) come into play. Having someone who can help point you in the right direction will be invaluable.
- On that note, the HUB has free legal services; for better or worse, you aren't the first student to be in this position.
- I understand in another comment you said you're confident in UW Leadership's ability, but crucially, there is no such thing as a singular leadership. At a university that large, *even when everyone is working to help*, things can turn out bad. (It's like how a CEO can get fired and nothing changes at a company; the system has its own momentum.) It's hard to say what level of intervention needs to happen to resolve this -- School of CSE? Undergrad CS department? Registrar? UW President's Office? -- and each level will likely not know what the level above/around them can do.
- (And if you do need to escalate, it might be worth reaching out to the Registrar's office directly, over email. I say this because they work at a university-wide level, separate from any school or department, and may have a more-final say on what any individual branch can do/not do w.r.t. your enrollment.)
- Remember that you are (likely still) one (1) human who needs food, sleep, and water. Those damn robots won't take over yet.
- Be careful what you post publicly! There is a reason the best PR teams stay silent. Less is more. Form a close group of people you trust to share information freely, and be very clear (to yourself) what your intention is with every public post. Is it to get validation/advice? Is it to put pressure on the university? The court of public opinion is a double edged sword! Not every interpretation needs to or will be true. (And employers, like the public, might interpret this situation positively or negatively. It's hard to say which way it will go!)
The last point is wisdom that I only acquired over time. I also used to be very aggressive in publicly attacking institutions, like TFA, and it definitely has downsides, even with best intentions of calling out injustice.
Stay calm, they will be the ones that will loose a lot and they will end up spending a lot ot time and money to clean-up their mess.
You will get plenty of job offers out of your post, and you don't need their useless degree anyway.
Universities are specialized in bullying from their admins (and often faculty) that have way too much time on their hands.
some people have to learn the hard way. at least he didn't go to jail!
I manage university relations for our corporation and give money (though not very much) to have our corporate logo next to the Udub logo.
I'm not sure this kind of misbehaviour reflects well on our brand.
Do you have a contact at the university I can talk to?
Do you already have a contact who coordinates the payments? Seems like a better place to start, as they'll be the ones who might care.
If I was a UW alum I would make it clear I am paying attention to how they deal with this.
The utter ridiculousness of this should have stopped them. I hope this post of yours gets plenty of airtime as blocking a solution like this deserves every bit of punishment it gets.
I remember asking for permission to get some innocuous University data to build an app to help students. University said no.
Then Mark Zuckerberg built the Facebook by ignoring the data usage policy and scraping University data.
I’d like to see the email where they demand you work for free! Lawyer up of this is the case.
IMO it should be ranked order and random assignment
Ranked base on what though? The other issue is registration doesn't always open for everyone all at once. Often you get earlier registration if you're in your final year(s) so you can take more specialized classes or fill in general education gaps that you might have put off.
something is missing from this story. it doesn’t make sense they jumped right to blocking your account because you requested to integrate. You sort of skipped over the part where you got hold of the Swagger files. would you care to elaborate on how exactly you found those files and if this might have been the reason for the heavy handed response? usually swagger files would be locked down on the backend .
They seem to be public. A simple "University of Washington swagger" search turned this up: https://itconnect.uw.edu/tools-services-support/data-reporti...
they're public. After searching for "university of washington student web service" thr homepage literally links to https://ws.admin.washington.edu/student/swagger/index.html
> would you care to elaborate on how exactly you found those files and if this might have been the reason for the heavy handed response? usually swagger files would be locked down on the backend .
Presumably by visiting `https://site.com/swagger-ui` or one of the other common doc endpoints. It's not that hard, and many places do not lock them down (even if they should).
This is pretty blatant extortion on their part. It reminds me of MIT and Aaron Schwartz.
Best of luck. It sounds like you really pissed someone off by threatening some internal power structure or process they controlled. I hope you don't keep quiet about this - I know it's easy to say when I'm watching from the sidelines, but don't let them coerce you into silence!
About a decade ago, some teammates and I built an internal request system for our Ops team to replace the MS Sharepoint crap we were using. We used Bottle, BootstrapJS and SQLite to get it up and going quickly, and under the radar. Our customer IT teams loved it, and managers from elsewhere in our department were even asking half-jokingly if we could support their teams, too.
Well, the IT team that was deploying ServiceNOW was none too happy that a "non-standard" application was running... our manager was a knight and kept them from making us tear it down. We pretended to play ball, we walked through SNOW process of getting a team-specific form to build out. And then we never used it; we kept directing our customers to the self-built tool.
The moral is, people like their fiefdoms. Bureaucrats often shun innovation because it has the chance to make them obsolete, or else they are simply the kind of people who don't like disruption.
You may also have invented a tool that would have obsoleted some multimillion dollar software acquisition or internal process, who knows.
Student builds tool to circumvent common university registration rules, is surprised when university objects.
Haha. The programmer ananlysts left the Ellucian swagger documentation up and public, and someone was embarrassed.
Looks intentionally up: https://itconnect.uw.edu/tools-services-support/data-reporti...
He wasn't disciplined for building an app or fetching data.
He was disciplined for blatantly trying to "hack" (in the YC sense, in UW's view) the registration process:
https://registrar.washington.edu/winter-2025-registration-ch...
"Know that trading, selling, or buying open spots is a breach of the Registration Tampering Abuse Policy. Consequences include referral to the Student Code of Conduct process, a Registrar’s Hold on your record, and potential diploma withholding for graduating students until the conduct process is complete."
https://registrar.washington.edu/registration/policies-proce...
"Registration Abuse The registration system is provided for the sole express purpose for students to register themselves into sections. Any use of the registration system other than for this purpose is considered abuse of the system. Such abuse includes, but is not limited to, buying or selling one’s seat in a class, holding seats for another student, or otherwise registering for a section that one has no intention of taking."
Disclaimer: I am making no claim about the ethical validity of this policy, and I don't know how well the policy is communicated to students. I am not commenting on the allegation that the University demanded free labor in exchange for not-expelling OP.
It sounds like the actual demo site didn't actually interact with the registration system at all. He mentions "fake" classes. That's what he wanted the API token for; that would have allowed him to actually make the site function, and he (falsely) assumed that the documentation meant the university was open to the idea.
So while it sounds like his site would almost certainly wound up violating policy had it gone live _it never did so_. That's a pretty good reason for them to deny the API request (which seems like may have not been intended for the public anyway?) But it does not in any way seem to merit the threat of expulsion, or, even worse, the fact that (according to the student in an update), even though he immediately complied they still put a hold on his account anyways.
There is some nuance here for sure, but I do not see in any way that the universities response is proportional to what actually happened.
Not to mention the fact that if it were so egregious, then why does the university want the creator's work or some modification of it?
The only source we have for this is the person saying it.
Good point.
I'm guessing he had been running the 'demo' site for a fair minute using scrapped data; but didn't get noticed/caught until he requested the token.
Still shit to lock him out after he pulled the site down.
> Such abuse includes, but is not limited to, buying or selling one’s seat in a class, holding seats for another student, or otherwise registering for a section that one has no intention of taking."
This bit is important.
At a glance, stubhub/ticketmaster/etc are pretty benign services that fulfil a pretty natural need for event tickets, but we've all seen the damage they can cause. There's a very real risk that OP's service could become a ticketmaster for UW classes, with all the perverse incentives that entails. Their reaction was probably excessive, but, from this perspective, understandable.
I'm a uw cs student, it is made pretty clear that you're not supposed to trade spots or otherwise automate any part of the registration. Students typically know not to talk about this stuff.
While well-intentioned, if this was commonly used it would mess registration up even more by making the "constrained" classes valuable and would be filled up quickly by people who wouldn't take them.
I was an EE student and worked for UW CSE back in the day, someone tried to do this back then as well and got very in trouble.
There may have been some browser automation scripts about… I wouldn’t know.
How were said student(s) even caught? I am assuming someone spoke too loudly or shared too much, but I'd be lying if I said I was not hoping for some kind of technical solution.
Not sure, but UW IT isn’t incapable of noticing repeated requests from the same IP or something, I assume most students are not setting up systems that go over residential proxies.
You typically need to be signed in in order to get all the course info.
UW does have that info publicly available: https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/WIN2025/
You do have to be signed typically to actually make changes of course, I imagine this tool would have to have your netid login… (yikes)
I benefited from a UW CSE spot trade in like 2010 and didn't get in trouble for it at the time.
Yeah, a small amount of "organic" mischief isn't bad IMO, but it's problematic on a larger scale.
Yeah I agree, not ideal given how limited capacity is in some classes.
It seems odd that they would want the author to provided them with a system to automate it then.
Can you explain when this horrific behavior (seat trading) is explicitly supported by UW, when they could simply NOT accept requests for trading seats?
I sign up for a class. I am on the roster. How is it possible for me to put your name on the class roster, for credit, transcript, and diploma, without the university going out of their way to help?
These aren't anonymous concert tickets or XBoxes. They are personally identifiable registrations.
If you look at the GitHub commit history, the repo was created before the blog post from UW, and also never contained actual courses.
This is important, because it's the only explicit reference to "trading open spots" they've made.
The Registration Abuse policy covers access to the registration system for:
* buying or selling one’s seat in a class,
* holding seats for another student,
* or otherwise registering for a section that one has no intention of taking.
It's unclear if HuskySwap actually violated this policy, given that it never actually accessed the registration system and no students used it in conjunction with the registration system of the school.
UW student - see the "Tampering and Abuse" section of (https://registrar.washington.edu/registration/policies-proce...) which has been around for much longer and is well communicated with students.
Yes, I saw that linked in the top comment.
What isn't clear is how this site actually violated that policy, if there was no course slot trading actually occurring. You could describe it as an attempt, but in this situation, the student asked for permission from the school before doing something that would violate their policies.
To use an analogy, if I sneak notes into an exam, that is likely academic misconduct. However, creating a formula sheet and asking the professor if I can use it is not academic misconduct. I wouldn't consider that to be attempted cheating.
He might have violated the following by testing alone:
> The use of robots and other automated tools to submit registration requests is expressly forbidden.
Some sort of testing will likely have happened, in which case an automated tool has been used. Even if only by TFA himself.
Also note:
> Because use of scripts, robots, or other automated queries can adversely impact University network and computing resources and interferes with equal access to registration, such automated querying of registration-related resources is expressly forbidden. Violators may have their access to University network and computing resources terminated and may be subject to action by the University under applicable law, regulation, or policy, including but not limited to, discipline under any applicable University conduct code.
The whole purpose of the project is to violate this clause. I agree that if no testing had happened, no sanctions should apply because the clause above doesn't say anything about attempts of use being sanctioned.
I'd personally describe it as an attempt for two reasons, although reasonable minds can differ:
1. They made substantial progress towards a working tool with available code, before requesting permission from the school. That request was to enable parts of the site, not requesting permission to develop/release it publicly.
2. It is pretty clear to students that you aren't allowed to mess with any of the registration systems/process (e.g. trading/holding classes). Your analogy has a very reasonable question (are notesheets allowed) vs a policy which is made very clear.
A different analogy is creating a hidden device to cheat on exams, then asking the professor for the exam room's wifi password as to enable it it in the future. While the situation is not as clear-cut as the analogy, I hope it helps show my perspective.
Yet another analogy is designing and presenting a radar detector/jammer but never using it on public roads.
Until the author has used the tool on the UW server during registration, he is not violating their policies and procedures: He hasn't attempted to tamper with records. He admittedly hasn't used their registration system with this tool. Those are the two key phrases in their policy. The text goes on to specifically describe abuse as "use" of a script or robot. There isn't anything forbidding a student from authoring a script.
One problem here is that by releasing the source, it makes it easier for another student to exploit the system. In the case where another student uses this tool during registration, the other student is fully responsible.
Besides all that, it's a great project idea because everyone in his program would instantly relate to the problem.
It's easy to understand the University's overreaction---and it is an overreaction. The better solution from UW would have been to sternly inform the student(s), "The website can never go live. It dies as a proof of concept. Please use your own dummy data; no API access. A disclaimer must be added to any class demos (presentations, code, etc.) with the Tampering and Abuse policy, and that this only uses generated data. Our efforts to improve the registration system in the future will be X, Y, Z."
This student has done nothing wrong (yet) (based on what he revealed) and is getting punished for being near the border.
How does a fake site, with fake classes, that had nothing to do with actual registration, violate that?
Why is trading considered bad? It is solving some problems for both students and administrators.
In my old days we did the same, only by finding someone who want to swap manually
The ability to trade creates an incentive to register for courses you don't actually plan to take, which leads to further scarcity.
Trading when it happens organically "oops I thought I wanted to take this class, but can't make the time slot work" is beneficial, but making it easy to register for a bunch of classes in high demand and then swap them with others messes with things.
It opens up for abuse by offering to sell a spot.
If a resource is so scarce that its real value is higher than the official one, the producer will have to either increase production, or accept that black markets will appear.
Why can't UW increase the number of classes?
The downside is that you may be unable to sell it and actually have to take a course that you don’t want
You can just drop the course - pretty much every university (in the United States, at least) allows students to drop courses one or two weeks into the semester without any record (on say, a transcript). Otherwise students cannot possibly plan their semesters, since courses may not make material available until after the semester actually starts.
So if you are planning to sell the slots and it does not work out, you just drop the course, no harm to you.
And the slot will be reallocated.
I won’t say no harm but you have to be pretty desperate to try to pull this off
"No harm" except for the several slots that were taken up by people hoping to make a quick buck (selling the trade) who drop a day or two into classes and cause the students who actually NEED the class to be very stressed and annoyed and possibly have to adjust their plans because they don't think they will be able to take a class even though it will actually be free by the third time the class meets.
It also just fucks with the University's ability to gauge class interest. In my university, if a class filled up early in the registration window, the University would try to increase capacity or add another copy of the class, but that's not always an option.
A reminder that this is not done for technical reasons. Plenty of colleges all across the US, big and small, custom-built registration software or purchased on the open market, have fully functional waitlist features. "first come first serve" is a policy choice.
Everyone is saying lawyer up like it's the author's only option, but it's not, and likely bad advice. Here's the order of operations I would take:
1. Mea Culpa
Talk to all of the faculty (dean of students, etc) and do your best to get people on your side. You need the petty person on the other end to reverse their decision, and having a lot of administration on your side, and more importantly, expressing (fake) remorse makes it easy for these jobsworth asshole(s) to fulfill their God complex. I'm actually convinced that this would have the highest probability of success. These Dolores Umbridge types adore getting to be the ones issuing mercy to the sinners.
Additionally, informing staff of the expulsion will help bring awareness of this abuse, and spread the word and prevent this from happening to other students.
While you perform your mea culpa groveling, record everything, which can be used as ammo later.
2. Agree to the (illegal) terms
Blackmailing you into slave labor is obviously illegal, but no terms have been laid out, so I don't see any harm in agreeing to them. Best case, they reverse the decision with the expectation that you'll do something (which you can then phone in or do a token exercise of), and worst case they outline terms which are the perfect ammo for negative publicity or a lawsuit.
3. Transfer schools/credits
I don't actually know what is involved in transferring schools or how expulsion factors in, but the reality is that you are effectively already expelled. Try and figure out the feasibility of saving what is salvageable at a school that is less insufferable.
4. Negative publicity
This story is easy to believe, sell, and consume- i.e. perfect ragebait. Start emailing every news outlet you can think of. Post on all social media. If it gets high enough, and probably not even that high, the weight of the negative publicity can easily outweigh the narcissists that started this, forcing a reversal.
5. Seek employment
If you have any employment cards in your deck, I'd consider playing them. If everything else fails, then at least you're financially secure and gain experience.
6. Lawyer
The combined weight of all of the above will assist a lawsuit, even prior to taking any legal steps. Note that all outcomes of a lawsuit that aren't "total win" are effectively a loss (of time, money, energy, and mental health), so I'd hesitate to take this course at all.
No one is suggesting to sue. The suggestion is to get advise from a professional, i.e. a lawyer rather to listen to random people on the internet. A lawsuit may or may not follow.
That's true, but it's difficult to envision any scenario where a lawyer supplies the exact advice needed to trigger a reversal outside of threats/suing/arbitration. Maybe if you get a good one I guess, but that is a gamble on its own.
A lawyer supplying helpful information like "Ok, this expulsion was triggered by the Department of Admin, which is overseen by John Smith, who has the power to reverse this decision. Schedule a meeting with him or find office hours to plead your case. I shouldn't get involved outright because it will escalate your situation and be received poorly." is less likely than "I can write a threatening letter and we'll see where it goes". A hammer hammers.
GET A LAWYER
Yeah universities are horrific for ethics.
I had a lecturer log in and leak the grades for my entire year, including my own, so his students could choose the best partners for final project.
Par for the course in the prissiest, most Karen city culture in the entire country. Seriously, living in King County is like living in a giant HOA neighborhood.
UW used to cultivate this kind of thing. Pretty sad that administrators choke the life out of everything. I suppose it’s the story of America.
Also... do you have the whole post somewhere. I didn't get past Microsoft's registration wall. It only let me see the first couple of lines.
Microsoft? Or LinkedIn?
I had completely forgotten that LinkedIn is fully owned by Microsoft.
UW alum here, my alma mater is a disappointment.
As an alum, you may have much more influence than you might expect. President Cauce (who's contact information is prominently displayed on the UW website) may be unaware that alumni are not pleased with this.
Tell them that. Alumni support is critical for a university and if they feel their donation base is upset, change will happen.
Yeah I'm glad I didn't go there.
I am working at a German University on similar systems. I have some thoughts here:
1. The thing you are doing, could provide major value to the university and you did it for free.
2. The fact that you could simply just access that data is a major fuckup on their part that is inexcusable. In my eyes the perdon who walks through an open door is not at fault, the one who left it open is.
If they expell you for that, they do not deserve you.
The first quesrion you should figure out is on whose feet you stepped and why they are butthurt. Simultaneously try to get legal advice and the social/political support of your collegues. If you have a big number of students complaining to the higher ups why your cool service is gone and give them the feeling it is needed, you might even get a cool collab out of that.
Without knowing the details of how US academia operates I would try to maintain a positive angle (you want to help making the university life better), while in privage preparing for the worst.
He probably accidentally exposed someone’s bug or other screwups
Amazing story. Why post on LinkedIn though? I'm not angry, just disappointed.
Homie is looking for work.
Serious question: where else, currently?