I believe the parent was referring to the AP Calculus exam, based off of his 2 out of 5 score[1]. For non-Americans, AP exams are standardized tests administered by the College Board (company behind the SAT university entrance exams)[2]. Most universities will accept passing AP exam scores as the equivalent college credit (e.g. a score of 3/5 is usually accepted as college credit for Calculus I).

AP Exams/Courses are offered in many subject areas and each have very strict guidelines (like which calculators to allow), which are dictated to the instructor by the College Board.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Calculus#Exam [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board

Upvoted because you realized that we're not all American and don't all have any idea what "AP Calculus" was.

No problem! At many US high schools, you'll have up to three levels of a class offered: standard, honors (advanced), and Advanced Placement (college level). Some schools may only offer one or two AP classes (depending on student interest), while others may offer dozens[1]. Any AP class must have it's curriculum certified by the College Board to be called "AP" and for the students to be eligible to take the AP Exam for the subject area. A really good way to get college credit; I tested out of an entire semester of college classes via AP exams!

[1] https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse

As was already pointed out, the AP Calculus test has been designed assuming that you have a calculator to handle the 'easy' number crunching portions for you.

The test is designed so that you still need to have a fairly high-level understanding of calculus and how the functions work. They aren't testing your ability to crunch out 56/7, but your ability to understand that the rate of flow of a liquid out of an irregular trough changes as the fluid level drops, and that you can model each portion of the equation correctly. A calculator isn't going to help you know that you need to account for a changing volume, and that the volume is directly correlated to the outflow.

It'll help you get the right formula for the area of a circle or volume of a cylinder, but not the higher-level reasoning that is really important.

Since 1995, the AP Calculus exam has been designed to require a graphing calculator.

In my opinion, that's silly, as none of the 3 semesters of college calculus I took allowed the use of a calculator, but that's the test that was mentioned.

That calculators are used on the AP calc test isn't exactly one teacher's decision, though.

(I actually did the same thing on mine, but fortunately extra calculators were provided, possibly because of their past experiences with students pulling this kind of stunt).