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by jbman223 1362 days ago
Reminds me of a passion project I started in high school that went completely viral and took on a life of its own. Wrote a small script for my friends to check their AP scores a few days early. Required high schoolers giving clear text access to their entire CollegeBoard account so I could log on and scrape their scores. Somehow it got posted to Reddit and from that year on, grew wildly. Got to almost 2 million students checking their score in its peak year. It was immensely fun while it lasted (ran for about 7 years) and honestly I miss the thrill of it. CollegeBoard now releases all scores on the same day so the site is pretty much useless now. Definitely always looking to chase the thrill of that score release day again though.

Congrats on a successful end to a fun high school project! Stories like this are always fun to read.
3 comments
arjvik 1362 days ago
You ran EarlyScores? Thanks for a tool that really helped my friends and I!
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jbman223 1361 days ago
You’re welcome - Glad it helped!
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np_tedious 1361 days ago
Can you elaborate on the approach? This sounds really interesting but I don't quite understand from reading your comment and https://earlyscores.com/about/

I think I remember paying some small amount of money (flat fee irrespective of # of years, IIRC) to get my scores quicker via a phone call in 2003,2004,2005. Perhaps I would've been better served by your EarlyScores.

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jbman223 1361 days ago
The approach was fairly simple: access to the college board’s website was geo-IP restricted for about 5 days time. It would start with a small collection of states, and each day over the five days another group of states would get access to the site starting at ~8:00am EST. I would get a few AWS/GCP/DigitalOcean nodes in a DC that had an IP in a state releasing on the first day. Put a small JS script on the nodes that would use the username and password input from students to sign in to their Account and send back the scores. Basically just a proxy without the need for configuration.
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unsafecast 1361 days ago
Probably wouldn't have helped.

> In 2014, with my first AP courses under my belt, I anxiously anticipated the release of my AP scores. What I realized at that time was that scores were rolled out by the College Board over a week’s time, and my AP scores would be accessible on one of the later dates. The need to see my scores on the first available date spurred me to create EarlyScores.com.

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drux 1361 days ago
https://github.com/jbman223/EarlyAP
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vertis 1361 days ago
I remember that kind of thrill. For a while I ran a tool for Etsy before they had an API, circa 2007. What they did have was AMFPHP, powering their flash toys (treasury, etc). I used it to allow sellers to see their sales stats.

Even went to the Etsy office in Brooklyn at one point and had a chat about it. I think some of the team was a bit bemused that I'd essentially extracted a large amount of data. But they took forever to get to the point of having an actual API (and I was one of the early users of this as well).

Eventually it became unsustainable and I shut it down, but it sure was fun having people be passionate about using it and sharing it.

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