When technology backfires

This past week I have hit a speed bump on the road of technology. Midweek I discovered two students cheating on the AR system. I personally am not that big of a fan of certain aspects of the AR system, but it has been entrenched in the institution. After talking with the culprits, as well as other random students, it has been revealed that the password to log on to the system had been out for the past year and plenty of students had been cheating. For instance they would exchange books; each of them reads one book and then they take their own test and one on the same book for a friend. Only five people in the building have the password, so it is kept fairly tight. Apparently a teacher wrote it down for a substitute (if this is indeed the truth, mistake to write it down) and a student saw it on the desk.
I addressed the situation only after consulting with other language arts teachers, the administrator of the AR system, and the school administration. I have no way that I could believe the integrity of the scores throughout the year; although I would have a hard time reversing old grades so I could not go back too far. The grades are compounded on a quarterly basis and we just finished a quarter three weeks ago. What I ended up doing was punishing the two that were caught with adding extra points to their goals and calling their parents. As far as the test scores, since I knew that the cheating had indeed went beyond these two students, I ended up voiding all scores for the quarter so far. The theory is that if they read the book, with a little review, they should not have a problem retaking a test. The people who did not read, will not get the points.
We (the five with the password) have made it our goal to change the password more often and keep it under lock and key. While addressing the issue I threw out the suggestion of everyone doing individual book reports on the same book, that was not received well. With the advent of the computer it seems that wide-scale cheating has become easier for kids to get away with because we assume that the securities that have been built into the programs will do our jobs for us. Not that there wasn’t cheating before computers.