High School Can’t Pick Valedictorian Because Hacker Altered Grades for Years

[tao]

An Alabama high school is in the unpleasant position of not being able to finish end-year school rankings after they’ve discovered that someone has been hacking into their IT network and changing grades since 2016.

 

The incident has been reported at the W.S. Neal High School in East Brewton, Escambia County, Alabama. The Alabama Board of Education and Escambia County Board of Education are investigating, according to local news station WKRG, who first broke the story.

No valedictorian and salutatorian this year

The issue came to light when school administrators were finalizing the end-of-year top 10 list of best-performing students. Administrators found inconsistencies in student grades.

 

Some grades appear to have been changed going back as far as 2016, according to a mother of one of the school’s students, who spoke with local news.

 

The investigation is bound to take a lot of time, and school officials said they wouldn’t be naming a valedictorian (highest-ranked student) and salutatorian (second-highest-ranked student) for this year’s graduating class, set to receive their diplomas in two weeks, on May 22.

 

School officials are now investigating some of the students whose grades appear to have been changed. The school said it would not be releasing any info on the investigation until it’s complete.

Some parents didn't take the school's decision too kindly

"It’s some shady stuff going on around here. So you mean to tell me that Neal [High School] isn’t going to have a Valedictorian or a Salutatorian due to a student changing their grades???!!!!," Monica Fountain, one of the parents wrote on Facebook. "We better start holding these kids accountable for their actions because we are only producing grown criminals. Stop putting bandaids on sores that need air!!!"

 

This is not the first case where students have hacked school systems to change grades. Such events are happening almost on a monthly basis across the world, not only the US.

 

Similar events have happened at a New Jersey high school, at a Louisiana high school, at a New York high school, at a Pennsylvania high school, at an Arizona high school, at Kansas University, University of Iowa, Israel, and China, just to name a few.

 

< Here >

[ZaG]

High School is mostly a joke nowadays anyways. Dont need math because of calculators, English class is outdated unless you think yourself a Victorian, and dont even get me started about History and Government classes! Whats left? Study Hall and lunch? Give the honors to the hacker if they find him/her. They probably deserve it more than anyone else!

[straycat19]

21 minutes ago, ZaG said:

High School is mostly a joke nowadays anyways.

 

I have to agree with that.  When I was in high school I took French, German, Spanish, Calculus, Physics, and Economics.  And four years after I graduated, before I ever took a college class,  I was given a test to evaluate my learning level and I scored 16+ in all areas, in other words, what a college graduate would have scored.  Today some states require tests before high school graduation and you have to pass in order to get a diploma, otherwise you just get a certificate.  The joke is the test is based on the 9th grade level.  So high school graduates now have the equivalent of a 9th grade education.  I saw a college graduate from a California university score a 3 or the Adult Basic Education Test that the government requires before some training courses.  That means he had a reading and comprehension level of a third grader.  No one believed it so they gave him the test again and again he scored a 3.  It cost him his career, he left with nothing.