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Comment by zaidf | Hacker News Reader

I thought my school was bad but reading this makes the administration at my school look like angels. When I launched a similar service at UNC Chapel Hill, the IT dept blocked requests from my server to theirs for scraping latest data.

They claimed I was creating excess load, which is silly because if they really did the math, given how many people were using my service I was probably saving them resources.

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UNC invested in what was initially planned to be the most expensive academic ERP system ever, and which then went way over budget and schedule.

The result? An even older version of PeopleSoft (which apparently is Oracle's second-tier offering) than what was being sold to other universities in prior years.

It's barely useable at all. It's utter shit-ware. The prior in-house system, which was early-90s HTML presumably layered over 1980s mainframe software, was MUCH better.

Personally, I am convinced that this was a MASSIVE kickback scheme. Tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, have been stolen from the State of North Carolina, and people need to go to jail for it.

IIRC the project actually did get a special appropriation from the NC legislature, but don't quote me on that.

This isn't just incompetence, I think it is actually a cover for massive fraud. I know, always blame things on stupidity if you can... but from what I know, no, you can't in this case.

I wish some enterprising journalist would hurry up and investigate this... could net them a Pulitzer or something. That is why I am posting this comment.

zaidf, if you didn't realize this already (and you probably did), when you made your alternative portal, you were fucking with some very powerful people.

Meanhwhile, UNC has also been uncovered as using the Afro Studies department to hand out free grades to athletes for decades. There were hundreds of courses and grades listed that literally did not happen. Fraud is absolutely rampant at UNC. Maybe that's why our new Chancellor left after like a year? The state of NC needs to completely clean house.

Haha you nailed it. I met with their main tech boss who was an older gentleman who basically kept telling me that the new system they have planned to roll out(from Oracle) will have the features that my site had. My site basically texted students soon as a class opened up. It got crazy traction.

I'm also well aware of the grading scandal as I still run a grade distribution site called blinkness.com which is heavily used on campis(even though I left unc years ago). We have a feature on the site called "Top A classes" and the professor in question always ranked very highly :)

I worked at a .edu for ~8 years. While I never had to experience it firsthand (thank $deity), I can't begin to count the number of horror stories I've heard from my peers at other organizations with regard to PeopleSoft. I don't believe I've ever heard of an implementation even going "okay".

Side note: those of you building apps aimed at specific industries, consider education (both K-12 and higher ed). As I said, I was at a .edu for ~8 years and, in my current role, I deal with a lot of K-12 schools. Both will spend outrageous amounts of money for decent software applications.

Some students at my university created a website to turn your timetable into a file that could be imported into a calendar app by screen scraping the timetabling website. The University actually helped out with hosting it and providing access to their SSO system. Win win.

I've done the same at my university, and they've mostly turned a blind eye to it. The timetabling department expressed concerns about students relying on timetables that are outside the university's direct control but have thankfully not taken any action.

To me it feels like people protecting their little kingdoms within a large organisation.

There is no market in which you have to compete against the new (superior) competitor so the only tool you are left with are fallacies like referring to regulations and proper protocol.

Semi-unrelated but, plenty of corporations see these fallacies as the best (and sometimes only) tools. In large markets money, political connections, and entrenched position are king.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism for details on political abuses, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry for examples of these fallacies.

There's no such thing as open market as long as there is also government and regulation (not that government or regulation are bad or anything).

But you're right, they're not the only tools. They're just (unfortunately) the strongest ones for those than can wield them.

Having worked in a large profit center IT dept at an Ivy League, I know first hand how many bad apps are developed and how many hundreds of millions are frittered away (or in some cases tantamount to stolen). I think working with students to open source and support apps is a way to go. The university concerns are: looking bad, students using an esoteric language, messy programming style or move on. If universities had more open APIs and data like the city of San Franciso, more apps could be developed to make use of the data in novel ways, as opposed to permission-based "culture of 'No.'"

Also this incident makes Yale look really bad... This could end some careers.

In my personal experience with education IT, all those concerns are problems with actual contractors :/

the people that decide the policies that IT services implement are usually the ones that know least about IT.

From my experience working several times with a large state university, this is absolutely true. The managers and administrators in the university IT division tend to be lifetime employees, who have absolutely zero perspective on IT except what they've experienced internally. Nepotism is rampant, incompetence the norm, and the whole environment is incestuous, corrupt, and highly political.

I also created something somewhat similar[0] for my school (Penn), and the only reason we didn't get shut down was because we don't make it easy to know how professor stack up against one another.

[0] coursegrapher.org

I was just thinking, "they wouldn't have done this at Carolina" but I guess I was wrong. When I was there you could run a torrent server out of Old West and no one cared.

ahh unc, vpn on 443 saves me every day

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