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.
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
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.
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.
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.