Parenting in overdrive: One parent's "help" has her facing jail time

We've all heard stories of parents gone overboard when it comes to doing for their kids. Maybe we even could be accused of taking the helicopter up a few times to hover when hovering time should long be over. Say, maybe we ran forgotten permission slips and saxophones on band day into school for an 8th grader who was days away from graduation. Yep. Guilty.

But Caroline Maria McNeal of Huntington, Pa., makes the rest of us look downright hands off, and, not to mention, sane. The mother/high school secretary is accused of using the passwords of three of her coworkers between May 2006 and July 2007 to change some of her daughter's--and other students'--grades and test scores. Her aim, in this age of college-application craziness, was allegedly to better her daughter's grades and class standing, at the expense of some other students, whose grades she is charged with tampering with as well.

The grades were all corrected before the students graduated, and McNeal now faces many years in jail: 29 counts of tampering with public records, a third-degree felony punishable by a maximum of seven years
Each count is a third-degree felony punishable by a maximum of seven years in prison and a $15,000 fine.

This was not a one-time, spur-of-the-moment piece of parenting madness. O'Neal is accused of changing nearly 200 scores and grades covering four years of school. She used coworkers' passwords, given to her to help with work during their vacations, the AP reports.

What happens in that moment where a parent crosses such a clear line of right and wrong in the name of "helping" her child? What could she possibly be thinking?