> since undergrads trying to hack their grade higher
Would student records even be stored on an unix system at the time? I am under the impression that Unix was very much a research operating system in the 1970's (either the subject of or a tool for). Administrative functions were more likely to be conducted with an IBM mainframe. (At least that is how it was when I arrived at university a couple of decades later, which I always took to be a legacy thing.)
Quite certainly not on v4 Unix, which apparently had few other sites and would not have been in the running for use as a serious university timesharing system. However Gates and Allen had already been among the secondary-school students who modified timesharing records to give themselves more time on a PDP-10 system https://web.archive.org/web/20191013171424/http://www.washin... .
Would student records even be stored on an unix system at the time? I am under the impression that Unix was very much a research operating system in the 1970's (either the subject of or a tool for). Administrative functions were more likely to be conducted with an IBM mainframe. (At least that is how it was when I arrived at university a couple of decades later, which I always took to be a legacy thing.)