Tedob1, you and I are in complete agreement that the blame lies squarely on the boy. He cheated, he deserves punishment. My only comment here was that things were being taken too far in my opinion. I think it is dangerous to start laying blame elsewhere for the incident. If the teacher broke school policy by leaving the computer unattended or unlocked then the teacher bears the blame for that and only that. If the school has no security policy or a very lax one then they are to blame for that, but only that. Neither the school nor the teacher encouraged or forced the kid to cheat. This can not even be seen as a case of entrapment since the kid obviously had to trick his way to get back to the classroom to gain the access.

However, I do think age must be called into question here. The kid is 10 so I do not ascribe the harsher aspects of unauthorized access and altering records. To me, at that age, it is simply a different form of cheating and should be punished as cheating. If the kid were older (and no I cannot set a hard age but would have to know the level of awareness rather than just the calendar age) then to escalate the penalty because of the seriousness of altering official records would make more sense to me.

I hope I did not indicate that I thought the kid was innocent or that blame should be shifted. I dislike that our society seems to want to place the blame on anyone but the perpetrator anymore. Again my only gripe was that I think the system is taking it too far to bring criminal charges against the kid.