341–350 of 460 posts
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The TI-89 is definitely not fair in a calculus class because it can solve most of the problems for you
Back when I was in calc, you actually had to show your work, so a calculator was pointless.
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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…
I had one professor that allowed us to use the Internet on tests. They were by far the hardest tests I took in college.
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I just tried it on mine and it worked fine.
Yes, it worked for you - but surely in an adversarial context, there's absolutely no way to trust a previously untrusted device. In the extreme case, the entire interface might simply be a simulacrum app designed to feign success at locking.
The only way to fool the teacher would be to jailbreak the device. The 6s running iOS 9 is the most recent untethered jailbreak. All newer devices and iOS versions will revert back to stock kernel after reboot. That means no jailbreak features and the home button & guided access mode work normally.
So to fool the teacher you'd need:
- An iPhone 6s or earlier
- Running iOS 9 or earlier
- With an untethered jailbreak (Pangu9)
- Running a fake app that behaves just like the app
- And behaves like iOS's guided access mode
I think that's difficult enough to discourage the vast majority of cheaters. If the school really wanted to, they could hand out loaners to the students with old iOS devices. They'll need a bunch for the students with and Android devices anyway.
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…
They are not winning because they have no competition. You don't win when you are alone on a market. As the article shows they have also massively lobbied to make sure textbooks make TI specific exercises which is just mindboggling.
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 big question will be whether the phones are rooted/jailbroken. That would open the door to pretty much anything.
Otherwise, with enterprise mode, it sounds pretty easy to block the access to all apps except for one.
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Back in Algebra 1 my teacher had a policy that you were allowed to use any program that you wrote yourself. More teachers should do that, though it'd get challenging to enforce if it weren't just the one or two nerdy kids taking you up on it.
As a competitive chess player I have sometimes fantasised that there should be a rule allowing computer assistance providing you wrote the chess engine yourself. I've written a simple engine to complement my chess GUI but such a rule would definitely push me to massively improve it.
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When I was in our high school equivalent, our maths teacher blew that trick out of the water simply by having us all clear the calculator memory, then having us swap calculators at random. Worked a charm. Next time, noone had bothered to hide notes as they didn't want to spend time helping some random sod out. Solidarity is dead. (You could, of course, try to counter this by having the entire class install the same c…
I’d be in trouble: I use RPN calculators, and am practically crippled if I try to use anything else. Of course, I’d probably not be in as much trouble as whatever poor sod got stuck with my HP.