We were allowed calculators too, but the problems were designed that anyone even mildly good at mental math didn't need them. In theory you could teach all of calculus without ever even using numbers (perhaps except 0).
Yes.
It's been so long since I took calculus but that's the reason why we weren't allowed calculators in my Calculus class. All the formulas needed for the test were also provided (as we weren't being graded on our memorization skills either)
My professor also said don't bother doing simple arithmetic just to simplify an answer - leave it at 12/56 or whatever.
Turns out, it was a really, really great system.
Mathematica, on the other hand...
Lets see if the kids know how to multiply fractions:
factorial(256) times ( 1 divided by factorial(256) ) equals ?
And yes, there will unfortunately be kids trying to brute force it by typing it in instead of cancelling the factorial(256).
I think the 89 is awesome for algebra because typing in an equation and doing an ans(1) with an operation will let you do the algebra process without making stupid arithmetic mistakes. I wish someone made a calculator that does this only and not one that does all the other CAS tricks for integration and derivatives. Oh and I wish they would make it RPN but that is a whole other story.
Another common trick: looking at your keyboard isn't cheating. Any small display secreted on your keyboard will go unnoticed. You will just look like you aren't a great typist, someone who needs to look at the keys.
Want to go real hardcore? Cut into your laptop and send the screen/keyboard/mouse signals to a different monitor. Then you can have an actor sit in front of the webcam pretending to take the test. I doubt they are correlating keypress sounds to characters appearing on the screen... yet. As any security expert would tell you: if the attacker has unfettered access to your hardware then all bets are off.
I had such a numerical methods exam, I had a python script ready for it. No regrets on automating something that should be automated. I understood how the method works and wrote code for it.
We were allowed (and encouraged) to write cheatsheets for most of our exams at university. However, they had to be a single sheet and handwritten.
The reasoning was that in the process of creating a cheatsheet, students would reinforce their learning. The handwriting requirement was to encourage us to write them ourselves, instead of just printing one off, and the size requirement was so that we had to think about how to distill a semester of learning instead of just trying to copy the entire textbook by hand.
I really liked the system, and I feel like it did help more than just allowing open book exams. I remember of the few exams that were open book (some even allowed us to use the internet, but with a ban on communicating with others), I usually got a worse grade, as I ended up putting less effort into studying.
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03/09/a-complicated-ca...
I memorized a lot of information, but I still search just as often on google and stackoverflow whenever I needed to check something.
It also help that I don't try to memorize a bunch of a crap before an exam.
The exams were incredibly difficult for bad reasons: you had to calculate many iterations of an algorithm by hand. You also had to memorize a bunch of algorithms (rather than understanding how they worked or how to modify them to solve different problems).
The professor also had a "can't do anything about it" attitude, and so the entire class was blatantly cheating as a result, and I got the worst grade of my academic career.
It sort of broke the camel's back for me; I consider our current approach to academics to be fundamentally broken.
It's harder to design exams where people cannot cheat, but it's certainly possible. Randomize the orders of questions on the test. Have multiple versions the same question (e.g. in a math exam, change a 2 to a 4, or a sin to a cos). Now you have unique exams for each student.
Most importantly, design questions that require critical thinking, and allow everyone to use their computers/books/notes/whatever. That's far more representative of real life anyway.
These simple changes would both make cheating very difficult, and result in better learning: memorizing a bunch of crap the day before an exam will have basically no impact in my life. Learning how to reason critically about the subject matter will give me lasting benefits, even if that subject never comes up again.
This ProctorU stuff is just quadrupling down on a fundamentally broken approach and making it much worse.