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.