9.20.2009

The Case of the Gibberish Grades

Last week Blacksburg High School gave out interim grade reports. This is done once each grading period, halfway through. This was the first, and this year we've "upgraded" to a new system that allows the teachers to use the same program for attendance and grades. Well, some teachers were having an issue where the printer spat out gibberish. One of my teachers, as a joke, gave us each one of these apparently indecipherable grade reports. Mine (actually not mine, but a friend's, since I can't find mine) looked like this:

The next period, English, I was looking over it for fun to see whether it was, in fact, decipherable. The first thing I noticed was that, where there were capital letters on the phony report card, there were also capital letters on the real one. For instance, in the column marked "Dbufhpsz," the 'gibberish' says "HFOFSBM." The real report card says "GENERAL." You may notice, as I did, that there are the same number of letters, and that 'E's on the real card are represented by 'F's on the phony one. From here, upon slightly more detailed inspection, it was apparent that it was some sort of accidental Caesar cipher in which each character was shifted by one. This was backed up by the abundance of exclamation points, which appeared wherever there would have been a 'space' character on a real progress report. I happened to remember that the exclamation point was #33 on the ASCII table and space was #32. I'm not sure what to do with this information. I could bring it to the attention of the school's technical department, but I'm not really sure what they would be able to do about it, or if they're even in contact with the writers of the software. Any suggestions?

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