I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

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.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=9A.56.120

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.

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.

OP please consider listening to this reply. Do not rely on an unaccountable bureaucracy to "do the right thing." They don't.

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".

> 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.

[flagged]

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.

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).

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.

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.

Something definitely smells.

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 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.

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.

So, for context, UW's registration system runs on, like, a single 1980s VAX.

I went to school about 20 years ago and we had staggered online registrations. Surprised the best solutions haven't propagated further.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's funny how a perfectly organized crime is not crime at all

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...

Missouri Governor was the one going after them for viewing the source of a public webpage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866805

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

You seem to not understand what a "key" is in computer science.

It's almost like this one-sided story is leaving some things out.

The conflict is so intense because the stakes are so low.

This reflects my experience as well.

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.

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.

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?

The English word petty derives from the French petit (small). So that's almost tautological.

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? ..."

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...

I’m an academic and my institution does all such things in house with a real engineering team- as well as a UI and visual design team. PIs can also pay them to develop sites for their own labs, etc.