I especially enjoy the University's ludicrous overreaction (seriously, read the letters they sent this guy; specifically the one where they demand he do the job of the "myUCF" team and come up with how he would update the application -- wherein he is specifically forbidden from saying he'd write something like the app that people obviously found useful since, you know, they were using it.)<p>I also enjoy that he has to attend a 'coaching session' where they teach him that University policy is sacrosanct -- and <i>he has to pay for it</i> as well as write a "spelled-checked [sic]" research paper about his coaching session (WTF is there to 'research' about an hourlong chat?)<p>What's even more bizarre is why this app exists at all. PeopleSoft's "SA" module that UCF is using for registration <i>includes a waitlist feature</i> that already does all of this -- actually, it's better, because it just pops people off the stack when a spot becomes available.<p>So, let's be clear:<p>- UCF willfully refuses to enable the waitlist option in PS<p>- Student uses a public interface to replicate the functionality<p>- Star chamber declares the student broke a nebulous IT policy and that he has to write humiliating 'research papers' as contrition.<p>And people wonder why higher ed is less and less valued...
It is embarrassing to see basic grammatical mistakes in a letter from a university:<p><i>Type a 5-6 research paper...</i><p>What is a "5-6" research paper? Even sadder is the officious and petty tone:<p><i>The paper must be in 12 point font, Times New Roman, double-spaced with one-inch margins...</i><p>I know what my response would be: two words, one page, 150 pt font.
I've got a better idea. Transfer. Nobody should tolerate this level of self-aggrandizement (in the form of "punishment" from anybody, even if they broke some rules.<p>The student made the administration of the school look bad/made them uncomfortable and they're making him pay the price. You don't have to play their games. Just leave.
The guy who made this app set up a timeline here: <a href="http://ucouldfinish.com/conduct/" rel="nofollow">http://ucouldfinish.com/conduct/</a><p>Reading his side of the story it seems that the University IT blocked it first out of fear of being overwhelmed and then the University looked for some way to make it stick. I understand that charging for the service is the reason they have officially decided to keep it blocked.<p>Unless he has misrepresented the facts about how much data his service pulls it is trivial compared to daily use of the university service. He has invested significant time and money into creating a much more user-friendly interface to the course catalog. That is worth the amount he was charging. The problem, of course, is that he does not own the course listing, and the university has every right to offer it on their terms.<p>Better to ask forgiveness than permission the saying goes, but in this case it seems forgiveness is not forthcoming. Based on the free garage spot counting app he mentions in the presentation it looks like permission would not have been granted either. So while the university is within their rights, they do seem to be contradicting their own value statements.
It's always bothered me how (even state-funded) universities tend to act as autonomous legal bodies. It's especially disheartening to see them trample on the bill of rights (e.g. most universities will have a "policy" that you basically can't say anything bad about them). If you do break some arbitrary rule, you can expect an arbitrary punishment for it. When it comes down to it, they can make you do whatever they want you to until you are no longer a student.
I used to work for a student information system company. These systems are all ancient, designed around a time when a dozen people would connect to the server using their green screen terminals or, in a spate of massive innovation, Oracle Forms.<p>As a result, all of the web access must be done through a single db server. Any app (including the portal) tends to directly access the db, causing all sorts of stored procedures to run. Nothing is cached. The server is only busy twice a year, fall and spring semester registration, so there is a limited desire to spend more than they <i>absolutely</i> have to on it.<p>Over all, IT in higher education in an interesting mix. There is a decent percentage of really good people there, who love the environment and are willing to give up the salary as a result. Unfortunately, there are also at least as many people who are earning what they are worth. The less prestigious the school, the higher the percentage of the latter.
It glosses over it pretty quickly, but it sounds like he was charging a fee for frequency of checks for the classes. Part of the slide presentation shows that the school's policy surrounding their electronic services forbids commercial use or personal gain. Maybe that's part of the problem.<p>Edit: The conduct timeline makes this pretty cut and dried: <a href="http://ucouldfinish.com/conduct/" rel="nofollow">http://ucouldfinish.com/conduct/</a> In the written statement of hearing determination (July 24, 2pm) they say specifically that he's in violation of their code by making unauthorized commercial use of their service. They then go on to talk about server loads, but the primary violation is the commercialization of their service.
I'm just wondering how such an obviously intelligent and enterprising young man ends up studying at an institution with only marginally more academic credibility than Hamburger University.
There has always been something wrong with these usage policies. Its a technical problem, no? If you don't want me to make more than X requests, tell your webserver to stop answering them. If you can't do that, then what the hell are you doing operating a webserver on the internet?
Where's the information on this? Was he querying the myUCF dozens of times every second? Is he accused of bring the networking infrastructure to its knees?<p>Or is this simply the faculty attempting to make a student conform? "Watch this presentation to see our side of the story." What story?<p>Edit: so we have to click more links on the linked page to get any more context. My apologies for being lazy.<p>"University officials, however, said Arnold's software was tying up the campus computer network, claiming it accessed UCF's scheduling website 220,000 times, as often as every 60 seconds."<p>I want to know if the reporter bungled the information or if these officials are this clueless. If this thing accessed the server "as often as every 60 seconds," where's the problem? Was the student really that clueless that he wrote his service to query <i>constantly</i>?
I love the part in the slide deck where he digs up a quote from the university's VP of IT talking up PeopleSoft's reliability.<p>“According to Joel Hartman, Vice Provost for Information Technologies and Resources at UCF, Sun really delivers in all regards. The Sun infrastructure for Oracle’s PeopleSoft applications at UCF provides outstanding reliability, investment protection, and performance”<p>- Joel, the initiator of this conduct case, stating how powerful the myUCF server network is in a technical brief for universities published by Sun Microsystems."
University policy like this isn't uncommon. Last semester, the campus police called me in and told me I was to receive a letter of warning for "bad behavior". When I asked what I did, they told me "we can't tell you because we need to protect privacy".<p>On an IT related incident, my school's IT department claimed that doubling the email inbox for every student (25mb to 50mb) would cost 4 million dollars.<p>Schools are terrible, and there's no solution in sight. Every university campus is like a mini dictatorship.
I wonder if some of the fear here is caused by the fact that this kind of tool would tend to get its users into classes first, before users that manually checked the original website on a regular basis... which seems unfair, especially since it has a (nominal) fee, and it removes the vague link between enthusiasm and ability to get in that manual checking entails.<p>But perhaps that's better stated as that the tool exposes the fundamental brokenness and unfairness of a system that allocates limited space based on who presses the refresh button at the right time.
The administration's reaction is clearly politically motivated. They're basically trying to hide their own incompetence in having a crap system.<p>It's incredibly stupid and frustrating for anyone who has an ounce of common sense, or cares about technology.<p>Hopefully this generates enough negative publicity to change the administration's point of view, because frankly, political pressure is the only kind of argument that toxic bureaucracies understand.
It's a shame that the University punished him for helping out students, though it certainly may have hammered the class registration servers as a side effect. Either way though, this is going to get a lot of publicity for a guy who's undoubtedly talented and motivated.
Considering the effort he put in to both this and the parking app, it looks like the guy would have little difficulty getting a job in the Bay Area or other startup havens, even sans-degree. At this point, I'd probably leave the university if I were him. Employers will accept him with open arms.
I built an iOS app for my school (Simon Fraser University) that allowed students to view/share their schedule with their friends. One of the most frequent questions I get is if the school has tried to shut me down and it is exactly for reasons like this that other students don't build more apps like this.<p>We have the same student system that UCF uses. It's horrible and slow. Tools like this make it a little bit more manageable.<p>I am surprised more schools dont have simple API's that allow students to build services on top of them.
I actually wrote a tool to do this very same thing at my own university. Worked great and got me the classes I wanted as soon as they became available. I only shared the service with a few people though because I knew the administration would do something like this if I made it public. It's wrong, but it wouldn't have been worth my time to deal with.
I was actually just talking with a buddy about how even schools that promote entrepreneurship (with possibly the exception of Stanford) so constantly stifle and work against entrepreneurs.
<i>6 page research paper on why maintaining a system like myUCF is difficult</i><p>"Maintaining a system like myUCF is difficult because caching is hard, so let's go shopping. Furthermore, lorem ipsum dolor sit amit. (6 more pages) In conclusion, I'm very sorry your publicly-available program runs so slowly. Although I don't have a degree, I would happily repair it for $500,000."<p>They never said it had to be good.<p>(Incidentally, University IT policies tend to be quite silly. I stopped attending school after they wanted me to sign something giving the administrators the right to search my off-campus apartment for any reason. Ended up saving me quite a bit of money...)
Is there a contact number or email address where we can speak to the people in charge at the university? Even if it doesn't change the punishment, they should be aware of how they are portraying their institution.
I'll be starting my Freshman year at UCF in the Fall. I would have loved to use this as compared to myUCF when waiting for my preferred Calc I class to open up. It was a hassle even to just check it every time, and I was never given a clear answer half the time.
For those unfamiliar with the University of Central Florida, the site's name "You Could Finish" is not accidental.<p>"UCF" has long been said to stand for "You Can't Finish" since at least the early 1980's (i.e. shortly after the name change from FTU).<p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can%27t+finish%22+UCF" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can%27t+finish%22+UCF</a>
This is a complete joke. Ok, so it's legit that they are mad that he was monetizing it. That's fine. Why do they have to humiliate and sanction him? Block access to the service and tell him not to do it again. Are we really still in the dark ages where we decide to make examples of people for infractions like this?
I suppose you could say that this sort of thing serves as a nice "education" in how the real world works sometimes.<p>I personally like to keep all my online work disconnected from my real-life identity.<p>If he'd written this app anonymously, since it only uses guest logins, the university would have no idea who wrote it. They might disable the guest access, but they couldn't have punished him personally.<p>Unless they were willing to commit to a lawsuit and managed to convince a judge to allow a subpoena of the app's financial records...
You deserve a scholarship.<p>Plus, you are obviously smart and capable enough to be fine if you didn't finish your degree. Better yet, as cantankerous mentioned, transfer.
This is ironic, as IIRC the computer science department at my alma mater (SJSU) had the creation of a class schedule finder as a requirement for all students in one of their core classes.<p>To think that another school would discipline one of their students for something that another school requires of some of their students is quite interesting.
I built one of these a couple years back as well. (I was going to be abroad and wasn't going to have internet.) I knew it had marketability. Glad to see someone come through with this! Bummer the school was so anal about it though.
The University idiot that sanctioned him should have to write a 12 page research paper on why it would have been better to buy this guy out and fold his product into the University website, so it could serve it's STUDENTS better!
I wrote a similar thing for Virginia Tech for private use. I definitely considered monetizing it but in the end I didn't.<p>Good luck.<p>But I think you're going about this all wrong. If you actually wanted to resolve this situation, you should have requested a meeting with the university provost or president and explained your service one-on-one -- with humility. I doubt they were trying to screw you over 'just because'.<p>It's probably already to late to do this though since you've gone to the media and have made it a big public issue. There's almost no chance that the administration is going to make any concession. The terms of service are written so vaguely they can do whatever they want.
The hacker rage is misplaced. <i>The student is in the wrong</i>. This is not a story of a bureaucracy run amok; this is a story of a student exploiting a university computer system and causing technical problems with their back end.<p>TL;DR: student creates a for-profit registration system that abusively scrapes the university's registration system, causing system slowdowns and preventing students who are not using the app from registering for classes. University policy bars any <i>for profit</i> applications from using the University's computer systems.