Montgomery County school officials could not promise an end to computer hacking on Monday night when they appeared before an auditorium of frustrated parents at Winston Churchill High School.
“The root cause is around human actions,” said Sherwin Collette, Montgomery County’s chief technology officer. “We’re continually fighting a moving target in terms of new threats involved.”
Collette, along with Churchill Principal Joan Benz and Assistant Superintendent Sherry Liebes spent nearly two hours addressing parent questions about the recent cheating scandal at the school.
Students allegedly used a USB port to install a “key stroke capture” program on 35 teachers’ computers. They used the program to steal teachers’ user names and passwords and thereby gain access to computer-based grading software.
Collette could not say if other systems were breached beyond the grading software, but did say that students’ personal data, such as Social Security numbers, were not at risk. He was not able to say how many total grades were changed.
Liebes attempted to address questions about the scope of the problem at other schools: “I don’t know that it didn’t happen at other places,” she said. “I know it happened here.”
The eight students implicated in the computer grade changing are not currently in school, Benz said. She would not expand on the investigations or impending disciplinary actions, citing student privacy laws.
The 46 students who were found to have had grades changed were not suspended from school. Their grades were returned to their original marks.
Benz explained that those students did not receive a zero because “we know that an unauthorized person changed the grade, but we don’t know who.”
A counselor could’ve changed the grade, for example, or a school administrator. Benz said that the grading program does not track the person who changes the grade.
The scandal was brought to school administrators’ attention by a suspicious teacher on Jan. 21. He had noticed several changed grades while completing final grades for the first semester, Benz said.
At the end of the presentation, a parent took the microphone and raised the distressing ethical question on the minds of nearly all in the room.
“Just to clarify, you’re telling me that 46 grades were changed and not one student came forward about this?”
