Students in Prestigious School Hack Teachers Grades

Keylogging has long been a method of capturing keystrokes on a user’s computer in order to obtain information such as sites the user has visited or even user-passwords. Last Friday, it was discovered that students at Winston Churchill High School, one of Maryland’s, if not the country’s, most prestigious schools may have used this method to obtain at least 3 teacher passwords and allegedly changed grades for 30 students. Six students are presently under investigation for perpetrating this violaiton. School officials are taking this very seriously.
Teachers were told to check grades for anomalies and correct them before first semester report cards are released Feb. 3, according to the sources. But because teachers at the school no longer keep separate log books of their grades, it might be difficult to go back and find a student’s original grade, the sources said. But according to Dan Tofig, school spokesman, there are systems in place that would allow the authorities to go back and retrieve the original grade and see what it was changed to.
Some teachers are careful to print out grades immediately after entering them in the system, one source said, but if grades were left on the computer system for any length of time before they were printed out, they could have been modified even on the printed version.

School officials urged Churchill teachers to change their passwords immediately and rotate them more often, the sources said.

Some of the students interviewed on Fox News said that the cheating was done out of pressure for achievement and fear of not getting into college if they did not have certain grades in their academic courses. WInston Churchill High School, a 2,100-student school has a 98 percent graduation rate, 11 points higher than Montgomery County as a whole. Its average SAT scores were 1820 out of a possible 2400 in the 2008-09 school year, the second highest in the county. If the students are found guilty of this violation, they are facing suspension if not expulsion. And if Seniors are involved this mayhave serious implications. Should they even be accepted into college if they were responsible for such actions? Some think not while some students interviewed think they should be given a second chance. Watch the video below and let us know your thoughts.