Author here--you're totally right. When we did this for our actual registration site, we spent hours inspecting requests in a proxy[0] to get to ~194 lines of PHP.
Yeah, that's more what I'd expect to see with a standard student information system. I can only imagine the amount of work it took - the last time I encountered a site like that that I wanted to scrape I gave up (this was before I discovered PhantomJS).
It's really too bad that universities don't foster creativity like this.
It's really too bad that universities don't foster creativity like this.