161–170 of 460 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a better solution is to have the school purchase all of the calculators and give them to students at the time of the exam. This also would align with driving costs down since schools will not want to pay $100 per calculator for their student body.
So then you'd have to use a calculator you've never used before during a high stakes exam? Doesn't sound good to me.
I've been a math and science teacher for the last 25 years. I have always told students they could use whatever device worked for them, and I have alway been very clear that the only reason TI calculators are so prevalent is because the test-taking companies require them. The only time I have encouraged their use is for students who are going to take a test that requires them, and even then they should only use them…
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. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…
The only time these calculators are actually needed is in exams - it should be pretty straightforward to let students use a TI clone app on their phones for regular study, and give them real ones only during exam time.
This reduces the need from 1 per student, to 1 per students concurrently taking an exam.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I in fact did this in high school. But now that the current high school teachers are people my age who actually grew up using the calculators, they are wise to that ploy. :)
I also did this, but never got around to storing test-related materials in my phone. It was mainly for preserving my goofing-off programs.
> The company established partnerships with big textbook companies that integrated TI-specific exercises (complete with screenshots of buttons) into classroom curricula. It sought approval for standardized test use from administrators like the College Board. And every time a competing tech innovation came along, it lobbied to maintain its perch atop the parabola. Absolutely disgusting
I still use all my HP calculators from the 80's and early 90's.
It's all about the keyboard. I can enter enormous streams of numbers and operators and never miss.
Same goes for universities forcing students to buy the latest edition of textbooks, despite the new version having very few differences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes most of my engineering classes back in college allowed you to use a cheat-sheet. Cheat sheets are way faster than thumbing through a book or notes in a calculator. And most problems required you to show your work. Maybe you could cross-check your results and fix something. The funny thing is to an extent, the performance of the student seems to be inversely proportional to the density of the cheat-sheet. The wors…
Cheat-sheets are also far more "real world" than the fake environment many schools cling to. I don't know a single practicing engineer that doesn't have a note scribbled somewhere. My engineering school recognized this decades ago and adjusted accordingly. Now the math department? They were a different story. No calculators. Period. Ever. Made higher-level calculus... interesting. Thankfully I'd already had it in hig…
When I took calculus the professor made sure that every arithmetic problem could be solved quickly. The trick he used was to carefully track factors when setting up the problem, so that the numbers never got very big, and also so that things had a way of cancelling (I can't tell you how many problems had one or zero as an answer.) Calculators weren't necessary and in fact would have been slower.
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. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…
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. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…
You can easily store notes on a TI calculator. I had a TI-85 in college, and was occasionally guilty of writing TI-BASIC programs to make tests easier (for example, I had one which computed Euler's method).
Casio FX-82/Sharp EL-W531/Texas TI-30. These go for ~20$.
Fancier ones like the TI-84 etc were only allowed during lectures, where you can already use your phone or whatever.
I think the market is under change for sure. Apart from less distractions and more native interface, there's no edge in having a TI-84+ anymore.
I had an HP48 throughout high school, college and grad school and I still look down on the TI people.
Features:
* ...
* IR/Serial Port
* Look down on TI peons.
* Removable Storage
* ...