Question about the hacking in to the school computer

It was fairly accurate for the time.

TL;DR but..

Some school boards, not many, had a remote dial in for teachers to record student marks from home. And in actual fact some really big schools allowed for actual phone dialer entry of marks. They literally edited either a raw text file or later in mac classic days a spreadsheet.

I'm not proud of this now. But when I was a student, I got hold of our admin password - systems back then had one general God key somewhat like a root password these days. I promptly granted varying escalated permissions to ~30 students and proceeded to change marks for students for $5 using any escalated account. While the only computer teacher scrambled to hunt down admin escalated accounts, I could use the teacher escalated accounts. And when they closed one set id scramble and create more. It worked all the way to graduation - by then I had spiked the library computers with a TSR I created (which also randomly injected swear words into print outs - I was a kid, it was funny).

Typically you changed marks on exams - which boosted the average. You need to do it throughout so it isn't a surprise to the teacher.

One day near graduation I received a letter from a school I thought I couldn't get in, and accepted into a cutting edge computer class at the time.

I remember meeting with my current computer teacher and he told me he knew I had hacked the system, but they couldn't prove it. So he wrote a letter to get me into the specialty program.

In the program I learned from the very best and got comfortable building things like token ring networks, and many other things long dead. But it was a transformational experience.

Point being - its unlikely a small school would have a system with dial in access for teachers with a central password. But it was very common in bigger and more tech advanced schools. Hacking was common enough - probably a few students a year, but people are caught far less than people think.

I find it hard to believe that the students' grades were on a computer at all in 1983, let alone one connected to a modem that accepted incoming connections. Grades and records certainly weren't stored on a computer at my school in the '80s. They were stored on paper (the teachers had grade books that they filled out with a pencil).

In 1983 when I was in third grade, we only had a couple/few computers in the whole primary/middle school building; TRS-80s (the kind with the integrated monochrome monitor) and they weren't connected to anything. The only thing I ever saw them used for was a math quiz program, where it would give you a series of basic math problems and when you finished it would show how many you got right/wrong and your time of completion.

All of our rank cards were filled out by the teachers by hand, and none of our materials were ever computer printouts. When I first started school in 1980 they used mimeographs and/or ditto copies, and by about the mid 1980s they were using photocopies.

Computers were nothing more than a novelty at my school; they had no role whatsoever in the school's official procedures.