A Tenafly High School student from Bergen County, New Jersey, is being accused of breaching the security of his school’s computer system in order to change his grades hoping to get admission into an Ivy League college.
For those who are not familiar with what an Ivy League college is, it’s a group of eight old, distinguished colleges and universities known for their ivy-covered brick buildings. The members of the Ivy League are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities; Dartmouth College; and the University of Pennsylvania.
According to The Record and NorthJersey, the accused is a 16-year-old senior who somehow hacked into the computer system and changed his grades and overall GPA. That’s not it; he even sent altered transcripts along with college applications however the administration recalled all applications once the scam was identified.
The student has not been named yet, but the Board of Education have filed two charges against him in a juvenile court. Remember, the hack was identified in October 2017, when the student accessed Genesis, a web-based student record data used by hundreds of schools in New Jersey.
It’s unclear how the student was able to break computer system, the Tenafly High School has hired a cybersecurity agency to improve its security to prevent further attacks. This, however, is not the first time when a student has been caught altering their grades; in fact, it has become a growing trend among students especially in the United States.
Recently, a student from the University of Iowa was accused of the cheating scheme by stealing test copies and changing his and his classmates’ grades more than 90 times over a span of 21 months. The FBI arrested the student on federal computer-hacking charges.
In another case, an engineering student from the University of Central Florida was accused of hacking computer system and changing his grade from F to B which under the state of Florida is a crime. The student was arrested after his home’s IP address matched the one that accessed the university’s computer illegally.
Note for students: Try spending your time studying rather than wasting time on such illegal activities. Remember, hard work pays off shortcuts do not.
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