High school has always been a hotbed of forgery: I remember kids sitting in the cafeteria, practising their parents’ handwriting so they could generate fake notes. According to the New York Times’ Education section, the age of high-tech document manipulation has moved that subculture into overdrive. As they report:

In interviews with principals across the country, many mentioned the ease of altering report cards and transcripts using desktop publishing software like Adobe Photoshop, which allows students to capture a school’s seal off its Web site and paste it into a file to create an official-looking document.

One administrator told of a student who was caught forging his report card when the nearby Kinko’s called the school to report that a student had left a copy of his grades on the copier. One principal said he had heard of students forging transcripts with generic-embossed seals to avoid paying for official transcripts.

So many schools have begun using secure, hard-to-replicate document stock from Scrip-Safe that the company began offering a product line specifically for academic institutions.