harry

Kyle, toootally dig what you're up to with this. Completely badass. If anyone can handle it, it's you.

Nothing but the best wishes!

-harry

The idea's still there in the administration tho. It's the Faculty who need to quit being butthurt about it.

Generalizing: Working with leading faculty is a bit like working with the 'always answers in snippits' students from highschool 40 years later in their life. Procrastinate, panics when something isn't the way they expect it, and genuinely quirky. All it takes is one noisy tenure to make a stink to a VP/P and many things get shut down.

Maybe in a decade when the damage grade inflation has done to accreditation and the value of a degree becomes apparent the faculty will allow for this type of thing to exist.

Yeah, University employees are contractually held to a non-compete agreement which would prolly break down here when brought to general counsel.

The grade distribution information is not considered restricted under any FERPA or other policy, but it is considered 'sensitive' and requires an external party to jump through quite a few legal hoops to access.

Edit: I serve at the behest of the Provost. So that was basically the boss/boss saying "we made a mistake, please take that down."

Yup. Faculty don't like you pointing this out and actually complain loudly to the Provost level administration at a University when it is done so. Here's what happened to me a few years ago:

I created a web app at the request of one of the schools & deans at the University I work for. (I do stats/database reporting full time.) It was wildly popular with students for enrollment purposes. After a few days it got shut down by a direct Provost order. The faculty did not like it being so easy to compare their grades with their colleagues on "identical classes" (large foundational courses math and science) and worried that it would damage departmental and eventually school reputation.

Personally I thought it was bullshit to take down (not only because I worked so hard on it and it was fuckin cool.) The data is released to companies (by way of an Open Records Request) that make money by selling "pick the best professor for this class" rankings to naive students.

Our research department devoted resources to making the application because we thought making the data easy to use and public would in fact CORRECT for grade inflation over time. Basically, I feel that the old way has to die off before any changes will be made and there's some pretty big changes looming for higher ed in the future.

I don't mean to be snarky but how is rape/murder/theft threat different than your daily life? Someone is going to go overboard and sucker people vs randomly kidnap someone at a Wendys?

I've tried multiple times. There's yet to be an acceptable place where/when I'm going.

I need breaks from what I'm working on - and this site fills that need. There's only so much I will get done in a day and this unquenched optimism & productivity that is common here is simply not something I do. I end up thinking back to something I read here months & years later, thus cementing it's leisure value above reddit, fukung and twitter.

I felt warm and fuzzy seeing @notch (minecraft) up there for a while as well. It's great seeing the indy developers support each other.