UCF Student Arrested After Allegedly Changing An “F” Grade To A “B” Grade in an Engineering Course

If Sami Adel Ammar, 22, is a criminal hacker, you have to hand it to him: he was modest.  Ammar is a student at the University of Central Florida and is accused of going into the computer system to change his “F” grade to a “B.”   While the B is a modest grade, the F was a stand out and the professor noticed when it went missing on his grade roster.

The UCF engineering professor was alerted to the change when he was curiously thanked by the university grading program for approving his grade roster.  The problem is that he had previously filed the grades and received an earlier thank you from the program.  He decided to check the roster and found that one of the Fs was now a B.  He could not change the grade back and then he saw Ammar’s name.  Ammar stood out because he had only finished a single assignment all semester and that assignment was not even for a grade. In other words, he was an actual zero.

The police also learned that UCF employees had seen two unfamiliar individuals in the staff rooms 306 and 307. The IP address used to make the change was located in room 306.  After reviewing security tapes, they identified Samuel Williams and Ammar.

The effort to change a single grade could not result in serious jail time for Ammar.