–
Jimmy

Your idea of giving people software they can run on their own computer seems on the money. Wesabe.com does this (with personal finances) – they offer a desktop app for logging into your bank account and pulling in your transactions. Your bank password stays safely on your machine. I imagine this should nearly eradicate concerns about liability, anonymizing traffic, randomizing requests, etc.

I let a couple friends use my code but I otherwise forgot about the idea until law school. Something about those first-year grades really gives everyone a lot of anxiety. And we all wanted to have our results the instant they came out. I was even checking constantly on the weekends, knowing that they wouldn’t be released on a Saturday. I finally put together a website that automated the task. I had some friends help test it. It worked as advertised, sending alerts when new grades arrived.

I realized, like you did, that the school may not appreciate being hammered by such a system. I came up with a couple solutions. The first is to add some intelligence to the checking. You can aggregate requests for a particular course (whether it be for grades or for a spot in registration) and then your requests become O(num. of courses) instead of O(num. of users) (depending on how the school’s system works, of course). I did some research and discovered that many schools use the same 3rd parties for their web/database systems. So expanding to several schools seemed like it would be easy: customizing, when necessary, for proprietary systems.

But that only works if students want to be notified when grades are available – not for alerting the students to their individual grade. In order to do that, the student has to authenticate to the site. Sure, aggregation could reduce the polling for updates and then the individuals could be logged in to retrieve corresponding data (or register them). It just seemed to snowball into lots of traffic. More than that – we’d be requiring the credentials of the students in order to do their F5ing for them. There are privacy/security issues there and I’m sure it violates the policies of every school.

The solution was to put the tools at the edge: let the users run the software. And this is where I abandoned the project – I didn’t care about my grades any longer. But the idea was this: give users some app that they can run on their machine. The credentials remain with the student, and the traffic hitting the school is now distributed. The traffic could even be made to look like human browsing (with a fake user-agent and random delays between requests).

Anyway, I think the demand is there. Students who desperately need a class to graduate will pay for this and I think overzealous grade checkers will too. The money comes in through sales of apps that expire and use the right licenses. Maybe there’s a web-based solution that can be platform-independent, but I don’t know what it is.