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Re:Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end? by tzs on Monday September 23, 2019 @02:55PM (#21052250)
> This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added.

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.

Re:Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end? by zerocrates on Monday September 23, 2019 @04:50PM (#21053480)
The law schools and bar exams have now settled on software that reboots a computer into a limited environment just for testing, where the administrators get to configure what kinds of features like copy and paste or spell-check are available (and of course, no stored memory from beforehand, or web access).

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.

Re:Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end? by massysett on Monday September 23, 2019 @07:39PM (#21054952)
When I was in law school this was called ExamSoft. Inevitably it would screw up someone’s computer before the exam, holding everything up. In my last semester the school stopper using it. We could type exams in Word and we were told simply that under the honor code we couldn’t cheat.

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.