How Not To Hack Something

In my many internet travels, I came across a little site had tips on how to hack Scantron cards. First and foremost, I hate those things. Carpal tunnel and Scantron do not get along at all. But I digress…the site reminded me of a little story I thought I would share:

By back in the day when I was in high school, the fine administration decided that you if had an A in a class, you didn’t have to take the final. Those of us would bring in something to read or doodle on while everyone else sweated away. Of course the teachers started complaining that we were distracting the test taking students or we weren’t applying ourselves to possibly get a better grade. So next semester they changed the policy so that everyone had to take the final, exempt or not. But if you were exempt, you could just Christmas tree your Scantron and be done with it.

And that’s what I did.

I made a nice tree on one, bubbled block letters of my name on another, and so on. I even did a “‘C’ is for correct” just to see what the percentage of correct answers were actually C. Then on my last final for the day, I decided to fill in every single bubble on the sheet. Front and back. ALL of them.

Turns out that was not a good idea.

I got to class the next day and found out that my Scantron sheet had more or less burned out the machine. My teacher ran it through the grader, it made a machine gun sound since it marked everything wrong, and sat there with an error message on it. It make matters worse, the machine “forgot” the key and wouldn’t accept it when she tried to load the key again. In the end she just had to use a different grader in another building.

Needless to say the next semester they had revised the final exemption rule again. This time everyone had to take the final and make a reasonable go at it. The only way it didn’t count was if you had an A and the final grade didn’t help your score. In other words…no Christmas Treeing the final.

I wonder why they changed the rules? …

So there you have it: how to hack incapacitate Scantron grading machines.

Have a super weekend everyone.

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