Some students do go to the length of modifying their school grades. So, how can you change your grades online permanently? Is it lawful to access your school’s portal to modify your grades?
It is not advisable to hack a school database to change your grades. However, if you think you can get away with it at the expense of no other school official, student, or teacher, then it may be okay.
Changing your grades online depends on your school’s backup database. If the backup database is in a drive, you can’t access the computer to change it. However, if it’s on the cloud, such as Google Drive, it may be possible to gain remote access and change it.
In most schools, the management, precisely the registrar, would have printed your grades, meaning you may not get away with changing your grades online.
Meanwhile, according to IBM’s Data Breach report, it takes an average time of 280 days to identify and contain a breach. So, it’s likely that a school may never know that a student or a group of hackers accessed and changed grades.
Can You Change Your Grades Online?
Yes, you can change a school grade online permanently. Alternatively, you can discuss with your professor to make adjustments to your grades. After discussing a possible grade upgrade with your professor, they might discover your attempt to change online grades in the future. Depending on your relationship with a teacher, they can tell your grades to determine whether you merit what is on the portal. Another problem with changing online grades is that the school may already have hardcopies and backups.
Permanent and Temporary Grade Change
This article exposes the permanent grade hack students use to change their grades online. A permanent hacking grade means that you’ll change your grades permanently without the awareness of the school – college of education, university, high school, etc.
There’s also the ‘temporary grade hacking’, which means you change your school grades online to deceive your parents, relatives, or friends. This method does not get you into trouble with the school. To change your grades temporarily, you’d have to log into your student portal account. Now, place the cursor anywhere inside the browser and ‘Right-Click’. Depending on your browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or any browser), you will see ‘Inspect Element’ or ‘Source Code’. Click the option and the browser will display the portal as pieces of HTML and CSS code. Scroll through the page gently to find your grades and change them in the editable format. Save the page because, after refreshing, the grades will return to normal.
Note that changing the code you see in inspect element can’t change the school’s website record. If you had to change it, you must save the code changes on the server where the portal site is hosted.
How Do You Change Your Grades Online?
In this section, we will discuss the various methods students use to change their grades online and get away with it. You must research thoroughly before doing anything. Collect necessary information about the student portal, including the software used and the people that can access it.
Below are the ways regarding how you can change your grades online:
Keylogging
One of the methods students use to change their grades online is keylogging.
#Requirements
- A keylogger
- Access to the computer of a portal admin
How does keylogging work? First, download a keylogging software or keylogger. You need a computer version and not the mobile phone version, except the portal administrator also uses their phone to log into the portal. There’re many keyloggers online, including Spyrix, Actual Keylogger, Total Logger, Netbull Keylogger, etc.
Now, you need access to the portal admin’s computer. This is the most challenging part because you must also unlock the computer to install the keylogger. Some hackers or students simply disguise themselves as teachers to reach the portal account admin in their office. You will need a fake staff ID, meaning you have to identify as one of your teachers. A risky one, right? You can also become friends with the administrator. Up to you. Unfortunately, most school portals are managed by third-party agencies.
Before then, learn how to install the keylogger on your computer according to the software developer’s documentation. When you have access to the computer, install the keylogger and activate it. After you install the keylogger, what happens? The keylogger will record every keystroke on the computer. What is a keystroke? Simply, it is the computer keys the keylogger records whenever a button is pressed on the keyboard.
Before you leave the admin computer, logout the portal account. Do this by opening the browser the admin uses to access the portal, and you’re done.
So, when the admin returns, as they log into their computer, the keylogger records the buttons they press. When they want to access the school portal, they have to re-enter their password because you logged out of the portal initially. As they type in the password, the keylogger records the keystrokes and stores them. The portal login details are now ready. A student now logs into the portal from anywhere and change their grades online permanently.
Finally, you re-access their computer and retrieve the password. Note that some keyloggers can automatically send keystrokes to your email address, meaning you don’t need access to the computer again. However, it’ll be a paid plan. You’d have to go to the section under the admin’s browser history in the keylogger keystroke logs to see the keys they pressed to access the portal. A student needs those keys to know the password and login name.
Phishing
A student can phish the school portal admin, whether a teaching or non-teaching staff. The aim is to collect the login credentials of the school portal to have access to the password. Phishing is simply deceiving the school website admin to release the login information unknowingly. It can be through a phone call, deceiving them about a scheme, etc.
How is it done? The common way is that a student or a hacker will create a phishing website that looks exactly like the school portal. This is done by cloning the school portal and then adding a redirect to the login URL so that after the admin enters the login details, they’re redirected to the original school portal.
We found a comprehensive article that covers the steps to create a phishing site. You might be interested.
The phishing URL can be emailed to the portal admin or sent as a text message. You just have to craft a way to get the admin to log into the school portal using the fake URL. You can disguise yourself as the school management or whatever, up to you.
When the admin uses the URL to visit the school portal, the site stores the username and email address in the hosting account. The admin is redirected to the original school portal within milliseconds, making it impossible for them to tell that they’ve been redirected from a site that collected their login credentials, the hacker or student then logs into their hosting account and retrieves the login information.
Now, you can access your profile in the student portal and change your grades. Ensure to erase the site logs to prevent administrators from knowing the changes. You also need a VPN to hide your identity. Also, a student will bomb the admin email so that they do not know about the login activity. To bomb an email means to send multiple irrelevant email messages to the email address to prevent the email owner from accessing a particular message.
Browser’s Password Manager
You can access the admin’s browser password manager to get the login credentials. Browsers have password managers that allow autofill, etc., and if the admin saves the password on their computer, you can copy them with this method.
The bigger problem is that you must know the password of the computer or smartphone used to log into the portal. A few decades ago, browsers did not require passwords to access the password manager, but now, chrome, Firefox, etc., request passwords to access the password manager.
When you open your browser, go to Settings and look for “Passwords”. Click it to access every password stored on the browser. If it is a modern browser version, you need the computer’s password to access the password(s) in the password manager.
Note: To access the computer, you may have to disguise yourself as a teacher, typically with a fake staff ID.
Brute Force Attack
Well, a brute force attack does not work anymore, but you may be fortunate, so it can just be one of the options to change your grades online.
How does a student use a brute force attack to change their grades online? First, the student will download a password list. A password list is a list of many passwords that will be used to attack the website. When a student gets a password list, they set it up and inject it in the servers of the student portal to attempt to log into it using multiple passwords. You can also include your passwords in the list.
Note that a brute force attack will cause server overload that may alert the website developers.
Why is a brute force attack no longer an effective way to change your grades online? Most school websites use security plugins or systems that prevent brute force attacks. When the system receives multiple login attempts from a particular IP address, it will block it automatically, meaning the attack fails. Some systems will set up reCaptcha challenge that the brute force machine can’t bypass.
Some website managers limit the number of failed attempts to 3-6 attempts, which is impossible to apply all the passwords in your password list, except you switch IPs multiple times. That can be time-wasting and, perhaps, useless in the end.
Hire a Hacker
Many students simply hire hackers to do the dirty work of changing their grades online. Paying a hacker is more convenient, and a student has all the time to focus on their studies while the hacker tries to break into the system.
The disadvantage of hiring a hacker is that it is expensive. Secondly, finding a good hacker is not easy, and you might end up with a scammer. Also, a hacker needs time to understand how the portal management of your school works and the individual(s) whose computer(s) they have to attack.
Well, @ FamilyInstructor, we do not encourage hacking or any form of malpractice related to it, except that we reveal how certain things are done.
It is your responsibility to find a hacker, and you’d also bear the loss if you end up paying a scammer.
How Students Change their Grades Online Without Hacking
Some students do not prefer hacking since it’s risky and expensive. So, what do they do? Below are methods students can use to change their grades:
Convincing the Teacher
The most common way students change their grades is to convince a teacher. It’s quite similar to convincing a mom, except that the student must provide strong reasons a teacher should change their grades online.
How do you go about with this? Before you attempt to convince a teacher to change your grade online, you want to know the teacher’s personality. Is the teacher student-friendly? How strict are they in class? Do they hint about helping students? Ensure to review your school’s position on this too. Have there been records of teachers and students penalized for changing a students’ grades recently?
Meet the teacher and explain how you feel about your grades. Explain that you’ve given your best, but your best feels like you’re not doing enough. Depending on the first reaction of the professor, plead with the teacher to consider changing your grades. The teacher will not rebuke or scream at you if they are a friendly type, so be careful what lecturer you meet.
Change Your Reading Strategy
You can change your reading habit. First, review your subjects or course daily. Write out the areas you find challenging to understand and find someone to work with you. Try to read aloud and explain the things you read to yourself. When it feels difficult, watch videos related to the subject online. You can ask your study partner(s) to send voice notes or recordings to you. Listen to the person’s explanation, and you’ll be amazed at how easy the subject becomes.
After reading, explain what you’ve read to someone as if you’re teaching them. You can make the explanations in the form of voice notes. Read and explain each book paragraph in the voice note. Do not also cancel the recording when you make mistakes!
When you have a test or an examination, read with a group of colleagues with good grades. Before the group reading, try to cover the topics you understand to flow during the group study. Ask questions and note down explanations using examples that will help you recall at least 75% of what you read.
Also, make small notes off your textbook because reading the entire text might discourage you. For each subject, make a summary with relatable examples you can use to recall what you read.
Finally, test yourself before every class test or examination. Meanwhile, we covered everything you need to know about cheating on a test using your phone. Since you’re trying to build your grades, you do not want to cheat with a device because getting caught means reducing the chances of changing your grades online. Your current grades will get even worse if you’re caught cheating with an electronic.
But then, we found in a study that 35% of teens cheat at least once with their phones, 65% say that other students cheat with them in school, and 52% admit to cheating using the internet.
The study also reveals that many students do not think cheating with a phone is an offense, but some think cheating with a phone is gross misconduct. This stat shows that you may not be the only person cheating. Even the next-desk colleague may be cheating, but it doesn’t mean you should cheat with your phone, though.
Going Under the Table
Do you know how many students go under the table to change their grades? Well, a lot.
Some students even trade their bodies for the marks. Would you do this as a student?
How do students engage teachers in a conversation that suggests going under the table or using any prohibited way to get more marks? It’s simple; they “ask for available options” that get the teacher to decide whether they’re willing to accept such offers.
Final Words
Should you change your school grades online? The honest answer is “No”. Changing your grades online is gross misconduct, and unless you get away with it, no school or institution will treat it lightly.
By changing your scores or grades online – whether through hacking or under the table, you’re cheating the system and intelligence of hardworking students. Moreover, hacking into the school infrastructure (school website/student portal) without permission is a crime in any country.
Our article has fulfilled its purpose of exposing the various ways students can change their grades online. You’re advised to refrain from these practices and study harder to earn better grades.
Good luck…
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