Choosing the right college class, and, in the larger scheme, the right schedule, is massively important and wholly underrated for university success. Typically, the inside scoop for each course is best and most easily obtained from students who've taken the class before, which is why one group of Yale students designed a website ranking current courses based on user ratings.

For reasons not entirely clear to the site's controllers, including co-founder Peter Xu, Yale blocked the site and eventually shut it down, depriving its over 1,500 users of course guidance, Campus Reform reported.

According to Xu's guest editorial in the Yale Daily News, the administration approached him and his partner, Harry Yu, about the site, called CourseTable, a few days before they blocked it under the pretense of "malicious activity." After speaking with University Registrar Gabriel Olszewski, Xu and Yu addressed the university's concerns, such as removing "Yale" from the site and restricting users from sorting classes according to ranking.

For having his site blocked even after he made the required changes, Xu accused the school of being "silent and opaque."

"In return for our transparency, Yale was silent and opaque," he wrote. "They said little, while trying to censor and disappear the application from Yale's networks without revealing it to the public - because this act of censorship would hurt Yale's image more than Bluebook+ could. This started on Friday, when Yale began blocking the IP address of the particular server to make it look like it was merely our servers that were down."

Less clear (from an outsider's perspective) is the origins of "Bluebook+," or the former name of CourseTable. According to Xu's letter, Yale purchased Bluebook+ (giving Xu and Yu money?), seemingly because they also had issues with it.

"Yale Bluebook had the exact same issues - except that it didn't make it easier for students to find the best courses with evaluations - and Yale bought it," Xu wrote.

Then, it would appear as if the partners started a similar, but improved site that gave users the ability to sift through courses based on rankings.

If those assumptions are correct, then Yale's charge that the newer site had copyright issues ("The reasons cited were that we were using copyrighted Yale data, that the website was viewable by non-students with NetIDs and that we had averaged evaluations," Xu wrote) makes a little more sense.

Clearly, there is more to the story than can be gathered from Xu's editorial, given Yale's so far mum response. Xu is as intent on finding the answers as anyone.

"Yale must embrace the values it abandoned: transparency, innovation, creativity, freedom of expression, and most of all, respect for its students," Xu said.

"We are disappointed that an institution we so love has let us down."