I also wrote a basic stock portfolio manager - this was the only chance I had to program during my 5 years there.
Trashy is sort of a slur on the poor. Not trying to call you out or anything, maybe there's a better word that trashy aka saying a person is like trash.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=expensive+designer+fashion+runway&...
Of course, you could always use a paper one-time pad, and if you can get the pad distributed without interception, there's no way they can ever break that.
https://file.wikileaks.org/file/anakata/13.1_GSW_09042013_AP...
You're thinking in the wrong direction—testing companies don't really care if you can access notes that you wrote, they don't want you to be able to quickly type up new notes as you take the test. Specifically, they don't want you to be able to copy down the test questions, because they charge money to get old test questions. They don't want the test itself to get out.
To this day I don't consider myself to have understood something until I can code it.
Maybe kids have gotten better at it since I was in school, but text entry on the TI-8x was a laborious process, and calculators with qwerty keyboards (like the TI-92) were quickly banned.
That said, I don't recall my teachers ever getting too fussy about having us clear our memory; in fact, iirc one of them actually told us to write programs to handle some of the nastier formulas.
Anyway, in my opinion, a good mathematics course should focus less on regurgitation of formulas, and more on problems solving---recognizing which theorems or strategies might apply to a problem and applying them to come up with a result.
If the rules say 'no computer assistance', and you break those rules in a way the test monitors didn't expect, the only people you are cheating are other students.
I think the bigger "loophole" is the ability to quickly solve simultaneous and and quadratic equations very easily using built-in functions on the calculators. This saves real time on tests like the SAT, because all you have to do is reorganize the equation to be in the right order, then tap in the coefficients to get the answer.
Really depends on the goal of the course. I agree a lot of courses I took focused too much on memorizing equations, but if you haven't committed something to memory, odds are you won't recognize new problems it can be used to solve. So, yea, 99% of everything you memorize will be worthless, but the problem is predicting which 1% will be useful in the future.
Get off my lawn.
Anyway I used an HP48GX throughout high school (carrying a TI83 only if absolutely necessary). The HP had a pretty much universal following in France.
The funny thing is to an extent, the performance of the student seems to be inversely proportional to the density of the cheat-sheet.
The worse thing you can request of a professor is to make it an "open book" test. Those tests are always damm hard.
Now the math department? They were a different story. No calculators. Period. Ever. Made higher-level calculus... interesting. Thankfully I'd already had it in high school in a tools-based curriculum, so repeating it with just fundamentals was less of a headache than it might've been.
And I agree - the simpler the cheat sheet the better of an understanding of the subject the pupil is likely to have.
There is no reason for any math course at any level to ever need a calculator, period.
The point of math courses is learning to think, not learning to avoid fat-fingering tiny buttons or learning the specific crappy interface of some anachronistic antique machine.
Without an electronic calculator students can’t be expected to do as much mindless number crunching, so instead the problems can be made much more interesting, unique, and conceptually challenging.
Frankly the same goes for science courses. If people need to process data resulting from physical experiments they should use a machine with a full-sized keyboard and a real programming language. If you want something portable a slide rule is entirely sufficient for anything that might come up in high school or intro undergrad level science courses. The students might even learn something about significant figures.
I could plausibly believe that upper-division engineering courses benefit from handheld calculators – I have no experience with those – but foisting $100 calculators on every high school student is a tremendous scam.
But numbers are a big part of some mathematics too. And getting some help with them can be useful.
Lots of our past mathematical geniuses were great at calculating by hand. And some of them even invented some mechanical calculators (or electronic ones, too).
Even in engineering and physics courses, you had better show all your work. If a numerical calculation was made in error, and you should all your work, you could still get a good amount of partial credit.
30 years later, I still just use a basic RPN calculator.
In theory that means that you could use your graphing calculator to verify your answer. But in practice, people ended up spending too long trying to fiddle with their calculator, not knowing how to use it properly, and getting the wrong answer in their calculator but the right answer when they did it by hand, getting flustered that they didn't match, and crossing out their correct answer.
Numerical methods courses need calculators for questions about practice rather than theory. Basic (non-graphing) cheap ones are usually sufficient, though.
I think slide rules are thoroughly obsolete in almost every context. There's no point in wasting students' time when better tools are available.
The point of learning a slide rule is not that it is a particularly important practical tool, but that understanding how it works has independent pedagogical value.
If someone built their own electronic calculator from discrete components, programmed one on an FPGA, or even implemented a bunch of mathematical functions on an existing computer, that would be similarly educational (though teaching different things than the slide rule), but just knowing how to navigate the interface of an electronic calculator doesn’t teach anything.
The point of using a calculator is to skip over the tedious unimportant details when learning other things e.g. Newton's method or Euler's method. The calculator itself is a tool, not an educational destination.
Learning a slide rule as you say makes sense in a history of maths course, and implementing one's own calculator makes sense in an electronics or computer science course.
There’s really not much pedagogical value in using a handheld calculator to apply Newton’s method to some root-finding problem or apply Euler’s method (forward differences) to model a differential equation. Both of these are very simple and students can learn enough of some simple programming language to implement them both in a very short amount of time. That time is much better spent than doing 4 or 5 examples of each with a handheld calculator. If a general-purpose programming language seems too much, get them implementing these simple tools in desmos or geogebra.
On a timed in-class exam in an introductory calculus course, there are much better ways of judging someone’s understanding than making them perform a bunch of tedious and error-prone number crunching. (For example you could give the students rulers and printed graphs of a function – without any symbolic expression written down – and ask them to sketch approximately what a solution using Newton’s method would look like).
If you want a nice introductory calculus book organized along more computer-focused and conceptual lines, take a look at http://www.math.smith.edu/~callahan/intromine.html
In a post-introductory-calculus “numerical analysis” course, the exams should consist of writing proofs, not performing algorithms.
The important thing for numerical analysts about different root-finding methods (etc.) is their convergence speed, numerical stability, computational complexity, and so on. In the 1960s and before it might have made sense to get students performing the role of human computer, but nowadays it is anachronistic.
> Learning a slide rule as you say makes sense in a history of maths course
No, learning how to use a slide rule makes sense in an algebra course for ~15-year-old secondary math students who are learning about logarithms, and for 15–17-year-old secondary science students. They’ll end up with a better intuitive understanding of logarithms and significant digits and error bounds after regularly using a slide rule for even a few weeks than any amount of reading about it or doing formal algebraic manipulation.
Electronic calculators give students a very misleading impression that all of the digits printed on its display are meaningful. But in high school chemistry, physics, etc. courses there is pretty much no experiment ever done with better than about 2 digits of precision.
Try doing matrix multiplications for hidden markov chains without a calculator. I dare ya.
Making students do nontrivial matrix calculations on a timed in-class exam just tests their calculator skills. There are a wide variety of alternative types of problems which will better probe their understanding of the course.
If your students are trying to learn about numerical linear algebra, consider getting them implementing the relevant algorithms in computer code.
> consider getting them implementing the relevant algorithms in computer code.
Cool, so we went from a statistics exam with no programming experience required, to a programming language exam with a theme of statistics. Because what? Because calculators are bad mmkay?
Yeah I'm not sure this idea has been thought through.
Seems to me like the concern is “what someone decided should be in the curriculum 30 years ago and nobody ever bothered to change even though it is now an anachronism”.
But anyway, I am suggesting writing programs could potentially be part of the homework, not part of exams. (At least, writing computer models was far more useful for learning about statistics than any textbook problem I ever did. YMMV.)
On timed in-class exams, there are many relevant pen and paper exercises that could be posed. Posing problems requiring a handheld calculator is a generally poor way to track whether students understand the content of a course. Then again, personally I think timed in-class exams are terrible. YMMV; some teachers seem to love them.
When I took calculus the professor made sure that every arithmetic problem could be solved quickly. The trick he used was to carefully track factors when setting up the problem, so that the numbers never got very big, and also so that things had a way of cancelling (I can't tell you how many problems had one or zero as an answer.) Calculators weren't necessary and in fact would have been slower.
Usually the same rule applied in physics exams too...
Good exam questions can be approached in multiple ways and are not a mental math test.
Bad math exam questions are usually those that can only be solved using one specific technique or lemma (ideally one that was only mentioned in passing once or twice) or require a lot of error-prone calculation.
We had one professor who was rather infamous for being really sloppy when writing exam questions. On more than one occasion did he accidentally transpose a couple of numbers in a problem, turning an equation that should have easily reduced to a trivial linear problem into a 4th degree polynomial with complex roots.
As long as you showed the working and the closest you could get without a calculator you'd get full marks (e.g. you could leave the answer as a fraction like 543/42, or as a power like 26^12).
They were quite good at my university for mathematics exams though. You were usually allowed a handwritten cheat sheet in the exam, and if you couldn't get the answer to a question that had follow-on questions they'd still give you marks for the follow-on question if you just made up an answer for the earlier question. If only the lectures weren't usually at 8 AM I might have gotten good grades.
This brings back the memory of the circuit theory exam. You could bring a cheatsheet but it was mostly useless. The test had very simple numbers (1, -1, 2, 1/2, -i or things like that) because the professor didn't want to be bothered checking complex formulas and the difficulty was mostly in keeping all of the subject in your head and applying all of the procedures without messing up the signs.
Needless to say, that exam by that professor had a reasonable passing rate and there was prettu much no way around it: you had to study.
They were by far the hardest tests I took in college.
Worked a charm. Next time, noone had bothered to hide notes as they didn't want to spend time helping some random sod out.
Solidarity is dead.
(You could, of course, try to counter this by having the entire class install the same cheat - but that would be unlikely to succeed...)
Of course, I’d probably not be in as much trouble as whatever poor sod got stuck with my HP.
Problem solved. Except if you happened to prefer RPN; I had a HP-48 which I had bought prior to the edict naming The One True Calculator - the day I enrolled at university, I started using it again, only to be met with a similar edict in my second term, naming the Ti-89 the only kosher graphing calculator.
Since I graduated, the HP-48 has been in daily use.
One time before a calc test I dropped my graphing calculator. The battery door popped off and the batteries popped out. The unit was otherwise unharmed... but my cheat sheet in the notes app was gone!
I nearly crapped my pants.
Luckily though... as most cheaters know... to make a decent cheat sheet you actually have to comprehend the material first. Half the time you wind up not even using your cheat sheet. Luckily for me that was the case. I still did well on the test.
There was definitely something about miniaturizing notes that reinforced learning
The attention to detail really got to me however over time - the normal reset message was in lower case, but all the custom programs could print was in UPPER case. I was always "its sooo obvious - they'll find me out", when I saw RESET, but nobody ever clocked.
I never did use these notes or solvers in an exam - once I knew I had them, I would remember them anyway.
Oddly enough in a computer science class we had an old professor. He accused me of cheating. He was right. However, he physically inspected my calculator like under the cover and where batteries are lol but did not check the programs. He apologized. I did well on the test.
I’ve never seen a professor that knew about archived programs.
I think it is standardized tests where the "clear your memory" would come up, but again, it was never done. I also don't think they asked any questions where the programs would have been an advantage, either. (The thing that's stuck most in my mind is the quadratic formula. The SAT could ask you "find the roots of this equation", but you don't need to know the quadratic formula to do that... the test is multiple choice so you can just multiply their answers and pick the one that matches the question. For that reason, I don't think they ask that kind of question, but I could be wrong. It has been a while.)
The professor still got me, I wound up memorizing it because the effort it to write and debug the program.
Casio FX-82/Sharp EL-W531/Texas TI-30. These go for ~20$.
Fancier ones like the TI-84 etc were only allowed during lectures, where you can already use your phone or whatever.
I think the market is under change for sure. Apart from less distractions and more native interface, there's no edge in having a TI-84+ anymore.
This also would align with driving costs down since schools will not want to pay $100 per calculator for their student body.
1. Ability to identify the right methodology;
2. Memorisation of all steps of that methodology;
3. Ability to execute the methodology correctly;
Parts 1 and 3 are important to demonstrate learning, whereas in the real world 2 is not. Denying books and notes only penalises children who have difficulty with 2, which is stupid.
Lol, I don't think I've seen that argument made before. They already pay near college prices for the text books.
Oh well, maybe someone will write a magnus opus EM book using differential forms to rival Jackson's book, and the next generation of students can learn it.
Apple actually supports this: "When you give a test to your students, you can lock their iPad in to an assessment app and turn off features that you don't want them to use."
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204775
I tried it just now with desmos testing app. It starts when you click "start test" and ends after 8 hours or when you click "complete". Teachers just verify that the start time and duration looks right before they click complete test and disable the mode. During that time you can't switch apps, look at notifications, etc.
But it doesn't work on personal devices.
The only way to fool the teacher would be to jailbreak the device. The 6s running iOS 9 is the most recent untethered jailbreak. All newer devices and iOS versions will revert back to stock kernel after reboot. That means no jailbreak features and the home button & guided access mode work normally.
So to fool the teacher you'd need:
- An iPhone 6s or earlier
- Running iOS 9 or earlier
- With an untethered jailbreak (Pangu9)
- Running a fake app that behaves just like the app
- And behaves like iOS's guided access mode
I think that's difficult enough to discourage the vast majority of cheaters. If the school really wanted to, they could hand out loaners to the students with old iOS devices. They'll need a bunch for the students with and Android devices anyway.
Yes, the teacher could do a more elaborate test sequence to verify that phones haven't been tampered with. But that requires (a) a bunch of time per student, and (b) an in-depth knowledge of technology and eye for UI details that Hacker News commentors have but schoolteachers often don't.
(Also, I'm not sure a jailbreak would really be required. On an iPhone X you could probably disable the Home-swipe gesture by setting that orientation to landscape or upside-down, drawing the UI and a fake home button right-side-up, and setting your app to "immersive mode" or whatever so the real home button auto-hides.)
Once Jailbroken, I don’t think you’d need a fake app. Just make a very simple patch that overrides whatever is preventing you from returning to the homescreen, and set up the patch to be enabled by a secret Activator action, like pressing the volume buttons in a secret sequence.
Contrast a single A-4 / US Letter, or 3x5 or 4x6 index card.
So, whether it was a result of TI's lobbying or whatever else, the fact was and I assume still is that competing w/TI with a similarly capable, reasonably priced device is impossible because such a device cant pretend to be a TI-84, or whatever. Simply having the same capabilities and restrictions is not enough.
At least for widespread standardized tests that allow or require a calculator, the obvious solution would seem to be providing students with one at the beginning of the exam. In addition to preventing cheating with unauthorized programs when students bring their own, it ensures there's a level playing field for poorer students who might not be able to afford one. Add an extra $1 to the cost of the test if need be-- the calculators should last at least 100 tests or so, and they could probably get a volume discount anyway.
The SAT II Math isn't the only test. The normal SAT math component also allows calculators and is generally administered on different dates. The SAT is offered on 21 dates in 2019, so that's a total of 27 tests. Even at a full ~$100 per calculator, charging an extra $1 per test would still cover the cost in a little more than 3 years.
AP Exams: Unlike the SAT which has regional test locations, AP exams are generally administered in the school you attend, and the school should provide a calculator. For that matter, the whole issue could be solved if schools issued them as standard equipment that same way they do textbooks.
Finally, the whole point of these tests is to establish the level of knowledge a student has. That hasn't really been done if the test takers aren't on the same level playing field. All else being equal, the same score for a test taker with a calculator compared to one without would mean very different things. It's supposed to be a standardized test. All students should have the same equipment.
Adding any more logistics into this process would increase costs and provide no headline-worthy benefit.
* The teachers, not the students, use scantrons
Either way, the headline-worthy benefit, if I take your meaning with that phrase correctly, is that this is a standardized test. You don't get to "standardized" by not providing equal equipment to test takers. Regardless of whether it's "easy" to do, it is a necessary condition for actually being a standardized test.
If there’s any appreciable quantity of arithmetic involved, that’s a clear sign that you aren’t dealing with a “higher-level math class”.
“Lower level” math courses also should not have excessive amounts of arithmetic. What arithmetic is included should be there for the express purpose of practicing arithmetic (at which point a handheld calculator is exactly the opposite of what you want).
At any point that arithmetic isn’t the point of the problem, the arithmetic used should be designed to not be a barrier or time sink. In pretty much any possible problem requiring substantial arithmetic where calculators should be handling it instead of humans, the student should be sitting down in front of a full-sized keyboard with a more capable tool (e.g. a general-purpose programming language).
Math students at any level spending nontrivial amounts of time with handheld calculators is a huge waste of their time.
Learning to fluently navigate a handheld calculator is not an important life skill, and has little to do with mathematics.
But once you get to pure mathematics courses at the undergraduate level (i.e. beyond the service courses math departments offer to engineering and science students) there is pretty much no arithmetic.
> Learning to fluently navigate a handheld calculator is not an important life skill
It very arguably is. Contrary to what HNers seem to think, not everybody wants or is inclined to picking up Python to tally up a receipt or similar, and that's quite okay. (Sure, the handheld calculator is often now a phone, but that's a difference without much distinction)
If people want to buy $5 “scientific calculator”, a 4-function calculator with a paper tape, use a free calculator app on their phone, type their arithmetic into google, ...., that’s just fine.
These devices are simple and straight-forward, and do not need extensive practice to understand.
If schools really want to spend class time practicing computations with a portable calculation device, learning how a slide rule works is much more pedagogically valuable. At earlier ages, learning how to use a soroban or counting board is also worthwhile. These devices have no hidden parts, and learning to use them is, in itself, mathematical.
You on the other hand called _all_ handheld calculators a waste of time.
Spending nontrivial amounts of classroom time on practicing using a handheld calculator is a waste. Assigning high school students long lists of exercises where they punch numbers into calculators and then write down the answers is a waste of time and attention.
There was a similar concern with typewriters when I wanted to type rather than hand write exams in law school in the '90s. By then most typewriters included some memory and some kind of display, with a delay between your typing and putting the characters on the paper so that you could correct recent errors without needing white-out. Some typewriters were essentially dedicated word processors that could hold one or more pages in memory, sometimes even in non-volatile memory.
To prevent cheating via typewriter, my school only allowed typewriters that had at most two lines of memory. I remember that I had a hard time finding a typewriter that was sufficiently limited.
The DC bar had just moved from typewriters (with the same "lines of memory" restriction you mentioned) to computers for its essay portions when I took the exam only a handful of years ago.
Reminds me of a “Leave It to Beaver” when Wally cheated (or tried to) by going to the bathroom and getting paper towels with the answers. It’s ridiculous to spend resources to lock down computers when there are much simpler ways to cheat.
And it can't be that hard to build a modified logic board that includes an LTE modem or WiFi chip and fits inside the case of a TI-84. If you're just going to copy the answers you wouldn't even need to bother cloning all the math features, just the very basics. The test proctors barely glance at the calculators as they hand out the test books, no one would notice minor changes in the look of the screen or case.
That is definitely a new thing. I wasn't allowed to use a calculator at all when I took the test 4 years ago.
The only time these calculators are actually needed is in exams - it should be pretty straightforward to let students use a TI clone app on their phones for regular study, and give them real ones only during exam time.
This reduces the need from 1 per student, to 1 per students concurrently taking an exam.
A “scientific calculator” (or for that matter a slide rule) is pretty much always sufficient in class, and a computer with a full keyboard and proper programming language (this could be a chromebook with a web browser, or a Raspberry Pi or used iPad with an external keyboard) is a better homework tool.
Nor have any of TI's attempts at replacing the TI-83 series, like the TI-Nspire. (Which even had a TI-83 emulation mode!)
What? It can run custom programs. Of course it can store notes.
Dude wound up in the Stanford CS program after high school, so clearly he learned something.
When I got my TI-85 (one of the earliest ones), I was one of two kids (the other kid had some $500 HP monstrosity) who had a full-on graphing calculator so "clearing the memory" wasn't even on the teachers' radar. I remember my calculus teacher being impressed that I could simply enter the terms of a binomial equation and it would just spit the answers out. A few years later, TI-83s were simply the required calculator for those classes.
This wasn't really necessary, as I had enough time remaining to redo the whole test without the programs, and then a third run without the calculator.
It can just be a text document, open it up with the editor.
Internet access is possible but significantly non-trivial on most models.
But they never foiled the genius plan a friend of mine and I concocted to write a program that would simulate all of the screens involved in the "check" that teachers did to make sure you had cleared your memory correctly. What we were most proud of was the fact that after it was all 'done', you could even enter basic calculations in the calculator and it would behave as expected, making you none the wiser that you were actually running a program of ours all along.
We also never used it for cheating. There was just something beautiful about knowing that we could, plus we had so many other games and things that it was always a pain to have to reinstall things after an assessment. Ohh the memories!
They are not winning because they have no competition. You don't win when you are alone on a market. As the article shows they have also massively lobbied to make sure textbooks make TI specific exercises which is just mindboggling.
It would on the other hand be trivial to provide a device owned by the school that Only runs calculator software without admin access. It would also probably cost at least a $100 per unit and be less familiar to students.
On the other hand it could be trivially used to say read electronic books/videos when not in use during tests.
They thought of those things and implemented a good system.
The original thought expressed was
>Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break out of, maybe things will change.
This expresses the idea of Apple/Google granting a third party control of your machine to render it suitable for use during the test. This restriction must happen at a level that is superior to the user on a device with a lot of personal information.
This is hard to implement and terrible for the users right to con their own device and their privacy.
The same restrictions on a school owned device not used for personal communication would be easier to implement and less worrisome.
You can store notes on the TI-84! With the program called TI NoteFolio. This can be disabled in at least The Netherlands with the so-called "Examenstand"[0] (Exam mode).
Exam4 and other software is built so closed book exams can be taken on normal computers. This is a pretty well understood problem.
You save the name of the program in a certain format and it becomes an invisible file.
Add to this building your own apps to calculate common algebra, chemistry, etc. My high school allowed apps as long as we wrote it from scratch and were willing to risk our grades on it.
Anyway, I think my school figured that if you were smart enough to write those programs you would be smart enough to figure out the solution.
Does this really need to cost $100, though?
I thought that storing notes was the selling point of the TI-93. You can easily add an app that does just that.
You can move your stuff to the frozen app part, do the default reset and than moe them back.
Not that I ever did this in biology class, but you could, even with images. I also never used it as a chat with my neighbour.
What is a proctor, and why don't they like notes?
The big question will be whether the phones are rooted/jailbroken. That would open the door to pretty much anything.
Otherwise, with enterprise mode, it sounds pretty easy to block the access to all apps except for one.
Yeah, it's true if you emphasize "easily".
You can still type in programs, right? I remember kids storing a bunch of notes that way.
In fact, one of the programs my friends and I wrote was one that faked the memory clearing process. This worked because at the time the test proctors didn't really know how the calculator worked so our fake was good enough.
Back when I was in school a million years ago, nobody thought to make us clear the memory before exams. So people just got away with it, as far as I know.
It was novel at the time and professors enjoyed it but it was short-lived as they soon mandated that calculators cant have an internet connection so that students couldn't cheat on tests.
I’m sure if I was in college now I would learn or create other tricks.
As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes.
Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break out of, maybe things will change.
But until then, they're going to require devices without internet and note taking.
Edit: Since everyone is replying "you can store notes!", yes, you can, but most test proctors know about the programs and make you clear your memory before a test.