Remember how people used to cheat by stealing peeks at their neighbor’s tests? Kids today are way more high-tech — such as Trevor Graves, a college student whose digital-age grade-rigging spree not only got him kicked out of school, it also landed him in hot water with the FBI.
According to Vice, the former University of Iowa student inserted keylogging devices — hardware that captures every keystroke entered into a computer — on his professors’ Macs and PCs. This move, Vice reports, allowed him to retrieve “everything professors typed, including their passwords” — giving him advance access to exams and even allowing him to change his grades.
It’s a criminal mastermind move — but unfortunately FBI agents, who got called in to investigate, do not give out coolness points. According to the Daily Iowan, Graves ran the school $68,000 in security updates. He now also faces federal hacking charges and up to 20 years in prison.
Graves isn’t alone, either: Nearly two-thirds of students in the United States know kids who cheat via high-tech devices, according to a study conducted by computer-security firm McAfee.
There’s the kid from Golden High School, in Golden, Colo., who loaded an entire exam onto his calculator and sold it to his friends.
Then, there’s the New York City high-school cheat who jockeyed for an edge on the Gotham-wide Regents exam in math by getting answers via text. “He did the entire multiple-choice section in pencil, most likely took his cellphone to the bathroom, wrote the answers on the back of his hand, went back to his desk, changed all 30 answers and got 30 out of 30 right,” high-school teacher Steve Goffner told education Web site Edutopia. Over in Thailand, aspiring medical-school students cheated on their entrance exams using glasses that contained hidden cameras, CNN reported.
For all the high-tech wizardry, kids’ motivations for cheating are pretty old-fashioned. Don McCabe, a Rutgers Business School professor who researched test scammers, spoke to the Denver Post about students’ justifications for their high-tech deceptions. “They feel a test is unfair . . . Maybe they had something to do the night before and didn’t study.”
Some things never change.