Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

Most test proctors make you clear your memory before a test in high school. In college they don't care as much because they are used to making "open book tests".

The textbook racket is bigger in dollars and just as exploitative. Follett bought a company I worked for. One of their first actions was to shut down the business of making high quality, affordable alternative teaching content and tools, greatly inconveniencing the professors who had been bold enough to use the product.

"There are programs that even dictate which TI model is accepted."

At this point in 2019, with such cheap computation, the school calculator lines are being sold as much on what they don't do as what they do.

Around 1994 or 1995, I had an HP-48G calculator, a real scientific programmable calculator meant for engineers and scientists, where the rest of the class had the TI line of school calculators. The HP-48G could do most of the integration problems we had, symbolically. IIRC, there were a few high school integration problems it couldn't do, but it did a pretty good job. And it was a bottom-of-the-line, stuck on an embedded system computer algebra system even at the time. It only goes up from there.

You don't want the students to be rolling into the SATs with computer algebra systems that can solve all the problems on the exam. This is also why they can't, for instance, bring in an Android system running the TI in emulation; it's not about doing what the TI calculator can do, it's about not being able to reach Wolfram Alpha.

The model restrictions are about the test authors being sure they know what's up.

(On the plus side, if you want to teach students how to use computers well, leave them a loophole where they can bring in their android phones, install a linux app, run Sage[1] from within that, and figure out how to use it to solve their high school calculus problems. You will learn something students, one way or another!)

[1]: http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/calculus/sage/symb...

The trick with those is you can make a TI-BASIC program that will make it look like you cleared the memory - fake empty "programs" list and all. There were a few tiny details you couldn't replicate like the highlighting animation, but they never noticed when I did it.

Casio makes several graphing calculators that are cheaper and faster than the TIs. $70 gets you the top color one that can run Python programs and is test compliant - it has a flashing test mode that disables all user memory. But the $35 b&w one works just as well for tests. So low income parents can get a good graphing calculator that does it all for around 1/4 the price of the recommended TIs.

Students fear Casio because the button pressing procedures are slightly different than TI and TI also has cleverly captured the textbook market, with TI specific instructions only found in many courses, textbooks, and teacher materials.

Below $35, there's $15 Casio models that can do numerical integration, solve equations, and find roots, enabling students to do most all things required for say AP Calculus exams easily, and the couple of questions that involve looking at the graph can usually be done by interpreting the critical points. One can get a 5 on the AP Calculus with a $15 calculator, though a couple questions will be slower and that might lose a few points, but not many because there's only a few questions like that. Most calculator required questions on various tests don't need the graphing capability at all even though a graphic calculator is recommended for the test.

Serious bad-asses can also take calculator required tests with no calculator and attempt to still get the highest score, and some manage to do this. College Board requires you to sign a waiver when you do this since the test center will normally lend you some random calculator and wish you the best.