No studying required—
Three Southern California high school students decided that studying was for the birds and devised a way to get As on their test scores---they hacked into the school computer system to change their grades.
Just like WarGames
In the film WarGames, Matthew Broderick (of Ferris Bueller fame) hacks into the school computer to change the failing grades of himself and his girlfriend.
But in the real life counterpart to this movie, the students are cited for stealing passwords and hacking into teacher computers to gain access to test answers. They sold this data to their fellow students who wanted an easy way to pass the exams.
Keyloggers
The students are accused of gaining access to sensitive test information by attaching keyloggers to the USB ports of their teachers’ computers. Every typed letter and digit was recorded by the keylogger programs and the students later retrieved these devices to gather the secret information.
Under the radar
When the three students changed their grades, they made sure not to draw any attention to themselves by altering their test scores to 90 instead of perfect scores of 100.
Palos Verdes Estates Police Sergeant Steve Barber said of the scheme:
"They didn't want to make it real apparent something was going on. They knew exactly what to do with the computers...All their grades magically came out to 90, the lowest total for an A."
Bright kids
The irony of all of this is that the students were actually very smart and didn’t have to cheat the system.
The principle of Palos Verdes High School, where the three high school juniors attended stated:
"They were bright kids. They were in AP and honors classes. These kids would have been going to a very good college without any academic dishonesty. That's the sad part about it."
Via MSNBC
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Written by: Frank Ling on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - 4:44 PM
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