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(USA Today) Interesting More and more school systems are abandoning paper report cards for online accounts. What could possibly go wrong?   (usatoday.com) divider line 61
More: Interesting, report cards, public schools, pilot programs, Reader Editor Brent Jones, Jefferson County Public Schools, superintendent, National School Boards Association  
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Bathia_Mapes [TotalFark] 2009-11-06 08:01:32 AM  
farm4.static.flickr.com

 
ZAZ [TotalFark] 2009-11-06 08:03:58 AM  
Bathia_Mapes

I never noticed the detail in that scene at the time. Why do students get mixed case and teachers upper case? And while we're nitpicking, why do CRTs make typewriter sounds?

 
wyltoknow [TotalFark] 2009-11-06 08:06:04 AM  
Ahh, the dread of carrying physical proof of your failure in your backpack on the busride home.

Thank god for scanners and Photoshop.

 
Majick Thise [TotalFark] 2009-11-06 08:19:42 AM  
www.macmeisters.com

 
tombotia [TotalFark] 2009-11-06 08:34:36 AM  
ZAZ: Bathia_Mapes

I never noticed the detail in that scene at the time. Why do students get mixed case and teachers upper case? And while we're nitpicking, why do CRTs make typewriter sounds?


Keys on the old IBM keyboards used to be wicked loud.

/the more you know
//misses my IBM PC XT....

 
foo monkey 2009-11-06 08:34:39 AM  
wyltoknow: Ahh, the dread of carrying physical proof of your failure in your backpack on the busride home.

Thank god for scanners and Photoshop.


I dropped my report card in the sink. Got it wet and changed that D to a B.

/no shop
//get off my lawn

 
bdub77 2009-11-06 08:37:11 AM  
The password is pencil.

 
StaleCoffee 2009-11-06 08:37:39 AM  
tombotia: ZAZ: Bathia_Mapes

I never noticed the detail in that scene at the time. Why do students get mixed case and teachers upper case? And while we're nitpicking, why do CRTs make typewriter sounds?

Keys on the old IBM keyboards used to be wicked loud.

/the more you know
//misses my IBM PC XT....


They still make keyboards that go clicky clicky.

Also, not everything needs to be online. I like to throw some shiat away when I'm done with it. I'm sure my kids will want to as well.

 
skinink 2009-11-06 08:38:08 AM  
wyltoknow: Ahh, the dread of carrying physical proof of your failure in your backpack on the busride home.

Thank god for scanners and Photoshop.


During Third Grade I had a bad report card I had to bring home. The idea I had to get out of showing it to my parents was to forge my father's signature. Using a pencil to sign it. Y'know, just in case I spelled his name wrong.

 
dasc 2009-11-06 08:38:09 AM  
I exceed standards at not meeting standards.

 
sniderman 2009-11-06 08:39:21 AM  
I asked for a car, I got a computer.

 
mjsee [TotalFark] 2009-11-06 08:47:31 AM  
StaleCoffee: tombotia: ZAZ: Bathia_Mapes

I never noticed the detail in that scene at the time. Why do students get mixed case and teachers upper case? And while we're nitpicking, why do CRTs make typewriter sounds?

Keys on the old IBM keyboards used to be wicked loud.

/the more you know
//misses my IBM PC XT....

They still make keyboards that go clicky clicky.

Also, not everything needs to be online. I like to throw some shiat away when I'm done with it. I'm sure my kids will want to as well.


Yeah...there's a company in KY that makes replicas of those old IBM keyboards. They are spendy...but I'm thinking of ordering one.

 
pounddawg 2009-11-06 08:49:07 AM  
Would you like to play a game?

 
usttsdw 2009-11-06 08:50:43 AM  
farm4.static.flickr.com

 
greighwolf 2009-11-06 08:50:45 AM  
I don't see that happening in the school district I was in. Too poor with the "Soopah" lined with all the dough.

mjsee: StaleCoffee: tombotia: ZAZ: Bathia_Mapes

I never noticed the detail in that scene at the time. Why do students get mixed case and teachers upper case? And while we're nitpicking, why do CRTs make typewriter sounds?

Keys on the old IBM keyboards used to be wicked loud.

/the more you know
//misses my IBM PC XT....

They still make keyboards that go clicky clicky.

Also, not everything needs to be online. I like to throw some shiat away when I'm done with it. I'm sure my kids will want to as well.

Yeah...there's a company in KY that makes replicas of those old IBM keyboards. They are spendy...but I'm thinking of ordering one.


Got one of them on the work box. Love the sound actually.

/They hear me typin'
//They be poppin' pills.
///Huzzah!

 
Pxtl 2009-11-06 08:54:12 AM  
It occurs me that a kid could make a lot of money selling a good Greasemonkey script to his friends.

 
Xai 2009-11-06 08:57:13 AM  
Look dad! I got an 'A*' in computer science!

I co-incidentally got an A*** on everything else!

 
dorkymidgetqueen 2009-11-06 08:58:52 AM  
Came for Bueller reference. Leaving satisfied.

 
IdBeCrazyIf 2009-11-06 09:00:31 AM  
Came for the War Games and Bueller reference.

 
GoodyearPimp 2009-11-06 09:02:41 AM  
dorkymidgetqueen: Came for Bueller reference. Leaving satisfied.

Mista Potato Head.... MISTAH POTAYTA HEAD!

 
Molavian 2009-11-06 09:02:50 AM  
greighwolf: I don't see that happening in the school district I was in. Too poor with the "Soopah" lined with all the dough.

mjsee: StaleCoffee: tombotia: ZAZ: Bathia_Mapes

I never noticed the detail in that scene at the time. Why do students get mixed case and teachers upper case? And while we're nitpicking, why do CRTs make typewriter sounds?

Keys on the old IBM keyboards used to be wicked loud.

/the more you know
//misses my IBM PC XT....

They still make keyboards that go clicky clicky.

Also, not everything needs to be online. I like to throw some shiat away when I'm done with it. I'm sure my kids will want to as well.

Yeah...there's a company in KY that makes replicas of those old IBM keyboards. They are spendy...but I'm thinking of ordering one.

Got one of them on the work box. Love the sound actually.

/They hear me typin'
//They be poppin' pills.
///Huzzah!


I have a couple of the Das Keyboards with mechanical switches. It's really awesome to get going on some long piece of typing, the sound of me clacking away on it will drive other people off.

 
yadumey 2009-11-06 09:03:06 AM  
dorkymidgetqueen: Came for Bueller reference. Leaving satisfied.

IdBeCrazyIf: Came for the War Games and Bueller reference.

Ditto on both counts.

/GRAAAAAACE!

 
benlonghair [TotalFark] 2009-11-06 09:03:17 AM  
What could possibly go wrong?

/b/.

 
StewMcG 2009-11-06 09:10:21 AM  
Our school district uses a program like that and I love it. Our teachers keep their grade books online and parents have read-only access to that, as well. Love it! Because my kids know I can check to see if they skipped a class or didn't turn in homework, it keeps them focused.

 
GoldDude 2009-11-06 09:14:08 AM  
I just watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off last night. Strange coincidence.

 
xpostal 2009-11-06 09:25:31 AM  
I came to see Ferris and was not disappointed. Well done.

 
Havokmon 2009-11-06 09:36:21 AM  
My kid's school district has worse security than my house. My eldest has been very naughty online, so I asked them restrict her access at school. At home I have a proxy server and no direct access to the internet for the kid's workstations, they're forced through the proxy.

Oh how surprised I was to discover their way to restrict her internet access was to disable her account entirely, leaving her unable to even write a document. Good job Waukesha.

 
IdBeCrazyIf 2009-11-06 09:42:08 AM  
Havokmon: Oh how surprised I was to discover their way to restrict her internet access was to disable her account entirely, leaving her unable to even write a document. Good job Waukesha.

Actually from a network administrative point of view, that's a damn good way to prevent abuse of access.

...not that its any smarter or anything..just saying.

 
CrazyCracka420 2009-11-06 09:43:52 AM  
It's possible to be abused, but you can access grade books whether they are online, on local computers, or in a grade book. The nice part about having them online, is that parents are able to look at their students progress as often as teachers update the sites. And at my school district, the grades are updated at least once a week, if not more. Proactive parents can see the grades a lot more than 3 times a year, and they can also see other information like how many times their kids have missed a class.

 
William Shakesbeer 2009-11-06 09:44:51 AM  
http:\\127.0.0.1\HappydaleSchoolDistrict\t3h_gr4dz0rz.htm

 
bedspread 2009-11-06 09:45:40 AM  
Pencil

 
CrazyCracka420 2009-11-06 09:45:44 AM  
IdBeCrazyIf: Havokmon: Oh how surprised I was to discover their way to restrict her internet access was to disable her account entirely, leaving her unable to even write a document. Good job Waukesha.

Actually from a network administrative point of view, that's a damn good way to prevent abuse of access.

...not that its any smarter or anything..just saying.


That's kind of extreme, but if students abuse the computer privileges at our school, we eventually do the same thing. We don't create/unlock accounts for students every year until they sign an internet agreement form. First abuse, we block their internet access, 2nd abuse we take away their network (Windows) login.

Not like they can't use someone else's login, but that's always going to be the case.

 
BizarreMan 2009-11-06 09:46:33 AM  
My daughters school uses online grade reporting. We get an email alert anytime a teacher updates the grades and can go and check it out.

As long as the teachers keep things up to date it's great.

 
Tigggy 2009-11-06 09:52:03 AM  
What could go wrong? Sounds like it could give kids the incentive to get really crafty under the guise of "Temporary Site Maintenance". If it's one thing kids care about, it's those report cards.

 
JimmySlicings 2009-11-06 09:55:51 AM  
I've been known to print fake report cards for my friends back in the day. I had one of those old printers where you had to load them by lining up the holes on both sides of the paper with the little notches. Looked exactly like the real thing.

www.sun3zoo.de

 
IdBeCrazyIf 2009-11-06 10:00:28 AM  
CrazyCracka420: Not like they can't use someone else's login, but that's always going to be the case.

Im in the middle of helping a small private school system go to biometric with key fob access. Its surprisingly cheaper now than most people realize.

I'll prolly help them write up their network policy agreement for the students as well, since you have to assume if you're login is being abused by someone else... you gotta be a willing participant at that point.

 
mrbill1 2009-11-06 10:31:55 AM  
Would you like to play a game?

 
b04155 2009-11-06 10:48:27 AM  
foo monkey: wyltoknow: Ahh, the dread of carrying physical proof of your failure in your backpack on the busride home.

Thank god for scanners and Photoshop.

I dropped my report card in the sink. Got it wet and changed that D to a B.

/no shop
//get off my lawn


Anything short of a pristine report card warranted an immediate call to the school to verify in my family.

/only cause my parents pulled all the same shiat I did

 
DeadZone 2009-11-06 10:49:08 AM  
JimmySlicings: I've been known to print fake report cards for my friends back in the day. I had one of those old printers where you had to load them by lining up the holes on both sides of the paper with the little notches. Looked exactly like the real thing.

You "had"??? I've got a genicom and an OkiData running right now.

/and get off my lawn!

 
Disgruntled 2009-11-06 10:49:28 AM  
I have 2 kids in the school system mentioned in the article. Seems to me that even though the plan was to put them online this last grading period they decided to send home paper instead, but there's a parent in the article who seems to say she got them online. Maybe it was just elementary that got paper.

Either way I'm all for having it as an option, but there are still people in the world that don't have a computer/internet access so paper still needs to be available.

Now on a related note the director of our school system is talking about doing away with paper text books and going to all online version. THAT is a horrible idea. What happens if I want my kid to do their homework somewhere OTHER than in front of the computer? Say outside, at the park, at the library, while traveling at a hotel... etc etc etc.

At times our school system shows the reasoning of a crackhead, on the report card issue not so much because they plan to have the paper option available, on the text books, absolutely crackheaded move.

Thanks
Eric

 
benlonghair [TotalFark] 2009-11-06 10:50:19 AM  
Havokmon: My eldest has been very naughty online, so I asked them restrict her access at school.

Relevant to my interests....

/takes a seat over there.

 
Fark_Guy_Rob 2009-11-06 11:17:50 AM  
People need to stop watching Hacker movies and start holding the schools responsible for the information they host.

I'll be honest, I was 'that guy' in high school. The 'evil' hacker. I was really just a kid who loved computers and, in particular, computer programming. The network admin hadn't secured anything. My vicious crime was enabling sharing on my network job. The network guy had made me the admin of my own folder - I shared it with everyone which allowed me to access my own files during lunch. Yes, I would go down to the library and work on my super cool VB6 program for class.

I was leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else in the classroom, including the teacher (who was really just a math teacher). I never did anything malicious. I never cheated. I just worked on my homework from the computers in the library.

After three months, my 'hacking' was discovered. I was kicked out of the class and threatened with expulsion. Apparently, I violated some code of ethics or something. I remember trying to explain to the principal the list of 'violations' they'd compiled against me. One of them was 'changing the resolution'. I explained how I wrote a program to change the resolution using a Win32API call. And how, I was in a programming class....and I wrote a program. And how my program was actually really cool and useful. And how, really, you'd think that would be encouraged.

All she took away from my talk about resolution changing was that 'I wrote code to see parts of the screen I wasn't supposed to'.

Long story short - I had a 100% in that class, but received an F. I was also 'banned' from using any of the school's computers 'ever again'. I was a junior at the time, so yeah, I had to spend my senior year unable to touch any of the computers.

Not once, did anyone ask themselves why the full-time IT staff employed by the district were unable to prevent an uneducated, untrained, inexperienced, 17 year old, from 'hacking' into their system. These guys are supposed to be professionals. Supposed to be.

I was just a kid, with no knowledge of hacking or malicious attacks or any of that jazz. And I wasn't *even trying* to do anything bad. This was just stuff I was allowed to do.

These are people employed by tax payers. And they are entrusted with very sensitive information. Grades are important, sure; but in the grand scheme of things....a kid changing his grade from a C to an A isn't really much of an issue. The real issue is when some hacker in Russia realizes that American schools are easy targets. Now you've got a bunch of 18 year-olds graduating high school who aren't aware of the fact that someone has stolen their identify and racked up countless charges and ruined their credit.

TV perpetuates this myth that any wiz-kid 16 year old can hack into any government 'dbase' he wants, in 10 minutes, no matter what. The truth couldn't be further from that'. The fact that so many schools are vulnerable to these unbelievably basic 'attacks' just demonstrates that high level of fail that is totally acceptable in public schools these days.

The irony of it all, is that the entire school board was perfectly fine with punishing a 17 year old kid who just wanted to work on his assignment because he needed to 'accept the consequences of his actions' but the 45 year old, IT professional, whose entire full-time job is to keep the systems secure...yeah, he didn't do anything wrong. I mean, how could he possibly know that if you give users administrative rights to a system - that they might use them.

Schaumburg High School - you suck.

 
RyanBerges 2009-11-06 11:22:08 AM  
I love our online grading system. Not only do I get to see the end of term grade, I get to see every assignment, so I know where my kids are slipping or doing well.

 
ReverendJasen 2009-11-06 11:50:10 AM  
My kids' school mailed us our login ID's to their online system to view grades and announcements, etc.
I shiat you not, the ID is a 32 character string of random numbers, and the password was 32 characters of mixed case alpha-numeric.
I only logged onto it once, and it took me 10 minutes to log in because I kept mistyping something in the password field. And it's a masked field, so you can't even review what you typed before hitting the button.
And once in the system, there is no option to change the password.

 
Disgruntled 2009-11-06 12:03:47 PM  
ReverendJasen: My kids' school mailed us our login ID's to their online system to view grades and announcements, etc.
I shiat you not, the ID is a 32 character string of random numbers, and the password was 32 characters of mixed case alpha-numeric.
I only logged onto it once, and it took me 10 minutes to log in because I kept mistyping something in the password field. And it's a masked field, so you can't even review what you typed before hitting the button.
And once in the system, there is no option to change the password.

Type your password into notepad, save the file then copy and paste it when you need to login.

 
Prof.Xomox 2009-11-06 12:04:44 PM  
Nine times?
Nine times.
I don't remember him being sick nine times.
That's probably because he wasn't sick. He was skipping school. Wake up and smell the coffee, Mrs. Bueller. It's a fool's paradise. He is just leading you down the primrose path.

 
Ben Dayho 2009-11-06 12:10:15 PM  
Came for the references to 80's movies Wargames and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
/leaving satisfied

 
SurfaceTension [TotalFark] 2009-11-06 12:13:22 PM  
wyltoknow: Thank god for scanners and Photoshop.

Or a steady hand and sharply pointed felt-tip pen

/not that I would have ever done anything like that
//changing a D to a B, for instance
///nope, not me

 
thompsonius [TotalFark] 2009-11-06 12:20:03 PM  
Can't believe I get to be the first to do this:

imgs.xkcd.com

 
The Popes cousin Count Popeula 2009-11-06 12:30:47 PM  
Fark_Guy_Rob: People need to stop watching Hacker movies and start holding the schools responsible for the information they host.

I'll be honest, I was 'that guy' in high school. The 'evil' hacker. I was really just a kid who loved computers and, in particular, computer programming. The network admin hadn't secured anything. My vicious crime was enabling sharing on my network job. The network guy had made me the admin of my own folder - I shared it with everyone which allowed me to access my own files during lunch. Yes, I would go down to the library and work on my super cool VB6 program for class.

I was leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else in the classroom, including the teacher (who was really just a math teacher). I never did anything malicious. I never cheated. I just worked on my homework from the computers in the library.

After three months, my 'hacking' was discovered. I was kicked out of the class and threatened with expulsion. Apparently, I violated some code of ethics or something. I remember trying to explain to the principal the list of 'violations' they'd compiled against me. One of them was 'changing the resolution'. I explained how I wrote a program to change the resolution using a Win32API call. And how, I was in a programming class....and I wrote a program. And how my program was actually really cool and useful. And how, really, you'd think that would be encouraged.

All she took away from my talk about resolution changing was that 'I wrote code to see parts of the screen I wasn't supposed to'.

Long story short - I had a 100% in that class, but received an F. I was also 'banned' from using any of the school's computers 'ever again'. I was a junior at the time, so yeah, I had to spend my senior year unable to touch any of the computers.

Not once, did anyone ask themselves why the full-time IT staff employed by the district were unable to prevent an uneducated, untrained, inexperienced, 17 year old, from 'hacking' into their system. These guys are supposed to be professionals. Supposed to be.

I was just a kid, with no knowledge of hacking or malicious attacks or any of that jazz. And I wasn't *even trying* to do anything bad. This was just stuff I was allowed to do.

These are people employed by tax payers. And they are entrusted with very sensitive information. Grades are important, sure; but in the grand scheme of things....a kid changing his grade from a C to an A isn't really much of an issue. The real issue is when some hacker in Russia realizes that American schools are easy targets. Now you've got a bunch of 18 year-olds graduating high school who aren't aware of the fact that someone has stolen their identify and racked up countless charges and ruined their credit.

TV perpetuates this myth that any wiz-kid 16 year old can hack into any government 'dbase' he wants, in 10 minutes, no matter what. The truth couldn't be further from that'. The fact that so many schools are vulnerable to these unbelievably basic 'attacks' just demonstrates that high level of fail that is totally acceptable in public schools these days.

The irony of it all, is that the entire school board was perfectly fine with punishing a 17 year old kid who just wanted to work on his assignment because he needed to 'accept the consequences of his actions' but the 45 year old, IT professional, whose entire full-time job is to keep the systems secure...yeah, he didn't do anything wrong. I mean, how could he possibly know that if you give users administrative rights to a system - that they might use them.

Schaumburg High School - you suck.


You sound bitter

 
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