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Doctoring the report card? Studying is easier
New York Times - March 2, 2005
Squared-off B's that look suspiciously like F's and report cards that get "lost in the mail" are becoming endangered species as schools go to new lengths to prevent forging of grades and transcripts.
Some schools have switched to high-tech, tamper-resistant paper, and others have set up Internet-based grade books that allow parents to monitor a child's progress.
Precise data about report card forgery is hard to come by, said Gregory J. Cizek, a researcher at the University of North Carolina who studies cheating. Nonetheless, only one or two cases - or even unconfirmed anecdotes - can be enough to make schools act to thwart cheating.
In interviews with principals across the country, many mentioned the ease of altering report cards and transcripts using desktop publishing software like Adobe Photoshop, which allows students to capture a school's seal off its Web site and paste it into a file to create an official-looking document.
One administrator told of a student who was caught forging his report card when the nearby Kinko's called the school to report that a student had left a copy of his grades on the copier. One principal said he had heard of students forging transcripts with generic-embossed seals to avoid paying for official transcripts.
Don Zeller, assistant principal at Munster High School in Munster, Ind., for example, said that although he could not quantify it, he knew forgery was a problem. He said he had decided to switch to tamperproof paper from Scrip-Safe, a document security company based in Ohio, after a local printing company could not provide enough safeguards.
Scrip-Safe sells its paper to about 350 high schools that use it for transcripts, report cards and even hall passes, said the company's chief executive officer, Joe Orndorff.
"Our high school business just walked in; it's not something we have salespeople for," he said, adding that most clients had seen the benefits of secure paper at the college level or had been contacted by a college about a fraudulent transcript.
Eric Hicks, the registrar at Mercersburg Academy, a private high school in Pennsylvania, said the school decided to start using Scrip-Safe's specialized paper for transcripts after discovering that a transfer student's transcript had been forged - by the parents.
"We didn't know until the final transcript came directly from the school," he said, detailing the parents' effort to create an authentic-looking transcript, including buying a machine to create a raised seal.
Mr. Hicks said the added security was worth the cost. "We thought then that people could forge our transcript and that tipped us over the edge," he said. "No one even flinched."
Other schools have taken to the Internet. Sandie Platt, the principal at Lake Central High School in Indiana, said that this year parents have been able to see their child's grades online through Edline, a service out of Chicago that allows students and parents to monitor grades, attendance, assignments and calendars. The school still sends out printed report cards, even if they are somewhat superfluous.
It's more difficult - and less rewarding - for a student to dramatically alter a grade on a printed card, since parents can monitor progress and no longer rely on a once-a-semester update.
Kent Vermeer, an assistant principal at Largo High School in Florida, uses the online grade book service ParentConnect, a part of Pearson Education Technologies. Mr. Vermeer said he knew that report cards were being forged by students, especially when they were printed on plain white paper, because he would continually get calls from suspicious parents.
The funniest instance he remembered was when a report card that arrived from Mexico on an official letterhead was translated. It turned out to be made up, with fake course titles. With the online system, Mr. Vermeer said, parents can now let children know that they are keeping track of their progress.
"It's a quiet way to monitor," he said, although he estimated that with only about 20 percent of all parents registered, use of the system is probably skewed toward better students.
The decision to go digital brings up new questions about hacking. Representatives of both ParentConnect and Edline said they had never heard of anyone hacking onto one of their servers, and since the Web sites are on secure servers maintained by either the companies or the schools, and the parent and student accounts are password protected and read-only, the susceptibility to hacking is minimal.