Here’s some news that will help ease the guilt of all you parents who desperately want to give your children a leg up on the stiff competition that faces them on their journey to institutes of higher education.
So you occasionally help out with your student’s science projects or you maybe drafted a few of his research papers and had him pass it off as his own. Not good. But, definitely not as bad as what Caroline Maria McNeal did to help increase her daughter’s chance of getting into the college of her choice.
The overzealous (see: desperate) mom, who used to be employed as a high school secretary, recently admitted to changing her daughter’s SAT scores—-on more than one occasion.
McNeal reportedly confessed that she used the school’s computer to tamper with students’ tests scores. In one case she allegedly changed her daughter’s SAT scores from 1370 to 1730. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Police, who arrested the score-tampering mom, claim that McNeal spent the last two years consistently changing other students’ grades as well, in an effort to improve her daughter’s class ranking. All tolled school officials estimate that McNeal changed more than 200 test scores or grades.
The tech savvy mom is now facing criminal charges, including 29 felony counts of unlawful use of a computer and tampering with public records. McNeal was also fired from her job. In addition, her daughter, who graduated from high school in 2008, says she has become the target of outraged former classmates, and is completely humiliated by her mom’s poor decisions.
Meanwhile, McNeal maintains that she was only trying to help her daughter “get ahead.”
Oh, her daughter has gotten ahead all right; she’s way out there… far, far away from the embarrassment she once called “mom.”
What do you make of McNeal’s decision to make her daughter look smart? Pretty dumb, huh?
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