This isn't a ban on TI-BASIC, which is what most students use when programming formulae and other helper programs.

It’s common for exam proctors to require you clear all programs from your calculator. I think the reason for banning native programs is that it was trivial to spoof the memory clearing in a way that was difficult to detect.

I had a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition back in the day, and if I recall correctly, it had twice as much RAM available as the OS exposed, and you could load a third-party assembly program that would wire up a specific hotkey to essentially swap banks of memory. This way you could have what appeared to be a clean calculator with no programs on it, then swap over to the other memory bank and all your programs would be accessible. Even telling it to clear RAM would only clear the current bank.

You can actually spoof the "RESET RAM" menu in TI-Basic, but only dedicated students would do it.

If you group the programs then archive the group, clearing ram doesn't delete it. Once proctor walks away, unarchive!

Was this because you would have to plot it line/pixel-by-line/pixel?

Something like that. You'd have to plot all of the text in all the right places, and also script the menu, delay, and keyboard response.

Are exam proctors really auditing this to that level? I've been out of school for a while, but I think I only remember the honor system being used.

My calculator was never checked before standardized tests, but some math teachers checked before giving class tests.

Theres some interesting incentives for teachers administering standardized tests to ignore cheating. Students who do well reflects well on the teacher and the school. I wonder how schools report cheating to standardized test administrators and what the rules are for scoring a cheater.

just quit allowing calculators at all. what in the world.

That's awesome! I really wish I had teachers like that. In high school, I had a fancy TI Nspire which had an incredibly hobbled language that vaguely resembled the classic TI-BASIC. It was missing a TON of important programming features but it had symbolic manipulation which I loved to abuse.

I wrote a program to balance arbitrary chemical equations using a series of ridiculous hacks. First, I parsed chemical compounds (like CO2 and H2(CO2)3, notice the nesting) by running through them char-by-char and translating them into expressions and then "eval"ing them: "CO2" -> e.C + 2 e.O (where e.C and e.O are free symbols). Then, I used the feature where you can type "X + Y | X=3, Y=5" to get 8 to extract the coefficients from the expression which I then shoved into a matrix and solved the system of equations. If you look at the code, you'd vomit, but it was a night of furiously typing on the abcdef keyboard that I will never forget.

I never actually used it in class because during this process I became so quick at balancing the simple equations they would give us that it took longer to type them in than simply doing it in my head.