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Teenage hackers ‘tried to change school grades’

While most students worry about exam results, two north German high school pupils are suspected of hacking into the school’s computer system to change their grades. They could end up in prison.

Published: 14 May 2012 12:03 CEST

Teenage hackers 'tried to change school grades'

Photo: DPA

The two 19-year-olds from Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein, were rumbled when teachers at their grammar school figured out earlier this year that their grades on the computer and those on paper did not match, local paper the Lübecker Nachrichten reported on Friday.

School authorities then lodged a criminal complaint against the university-hopefuls for hacking and data manipulation – the first case of its kind in the state. If they are found guilty they could face charges of hacking and data manipulation and may even have to spend time behind bars.

Ironically, the unnamed pair are thought to have picked up inside information when working with teachers to improve the school’s internal computer network – with the aim to make the system more user-friendly.

Rüdiger Bleich, head teacher at the Johanneum grammar school was left baffled, telling the Lübecker Nachrichten that the two students had in any case scored highly, making the attempted cheat pointless.

“They clearly wanted to change their grades,” said Bleich. “But at no point would they have been able to access the central database.”

State data protection expert Thilo Weichert warned the Ministry for Education in 2011 about holes in school computer systems, but little was done to heed his concern.

He told the Lübecker Nachrichten that it would not be too difficult for pupils to obtain an administration log-in and gain access to private data inside their school’s system.

But despite the recent breach, head teacher Bleich said he felt students would not have any business looking in the internal network, and that efforts to make the system more accessible would continue as “the trust is there.”

The Local/jcw

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Schools in Sweden discriminate against parents with Arabic names: study

In one of the largest discrimination experiments ever carried out in the country, 3,430 primary schools were contacted via email by a false parent who wanted to know more about the school. The parent left information about their name and profession.

In the email, the false parent stated that they were interested in placing their child at the school, and questions were asked about the school’s profile, queue length, and how the application process worked. The parent was either low-educated (nursing assistant) or highly educated (dentist). Some parents gave Swedish names and others gave “Arabic-sounding” names.

The report’s author, Jonas Larsson Taghizadeh said that the study had demonstrated “relatively large and statistically significant negative effects” for the fictional Arabic parents.

“Our results show that responses to emails signed with Arabic names from school principals are less friendly, are less likely to indicate that there are open slots, and are less likely to contain positive information about the school,” he told The Local.

READ ALSO: Men with foreign names face job discrimination in Sweden: study

The email responses received by the fictional Arabic parents were rated five percent less friendly than those received by the fictional Swedish parents, schools were 3.2 percentage points less likely to tell Arabic parents that there were open slots at the school, and were 3.9 percentage points less likely to include positive information about the municipality or the school.

There was no statistically significant difference in the response rate and number of questions answered by schools to Swedish or Arabic-sounding parents.

Taghizadeh said that there was more discrimination against those with a low social-economic status job than against those with an Arabic name, with the worst affected group being those who combined the two.

“For socioeconomic discrimination, the results are similar, however, here the discrimination effects are somewhat larger,” he told The Local.

Having a high economic status profession tended to cancel out the negative effects of having an Arabic name.

“The discrimination effects are substantially important, as they could potentially indirectly influence parents’ school choice decision,” Taghizadeh said.

“Investigating socioeconomic discrimination is also important in itself, as discrimination is seldom studied and as explicit discrimination legislation that bans class-based discrimination is rare in Western countries including Sweden, in contrast to laws against ethnic discrimination.”

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