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TI calculators are the biggest technology racket in education. The fact alone that most schools won't allow the use of Casio equivalents deserves an anti-trust

TI calculators are the biggest technology racket in education. The fact alone that most schools won't allow the use of Casio equivalents deserves an anti-trust investigation. There are programs that even dictate which TI model is accepted.

gnulinux 7y ago
When I was taking my AP finals, the school I'll attend them in gave me a list of models they will accept. My school does NOT have AP system, so I had to take it in a different school (which is the only school supports it in my country), thus I had 0 leverage. I didn't have one of the calculators they allow (some other Casio model), I called them and they told me I'll be rejected to take the exam. I had to buy another calculator just to take the final. Even though it's almost 100% same as the calculator I had. Miserable.
- bby 7y ago
  damn bro
- fwip 7y ago
  That sucks. In my experience, kids who didn't have them were offered loaners for the duration of the test.
  - gnulinux 7y ago
    They told me that's a possibility but (1) I didn't wanna be stuck with a foreign/sucky calculator in my Calculus BC test since it has parts that require you to use a calculator and (2) they said there is no guarantee, so I didn't wanna take my chances (what if I'm late and they're out of all extra calculators)
smolder 7y ago
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.
jerf 7y ago
"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/symbolic/integration/integral.html http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/calculus/sage/symb...
- nextos 7y ago
  I started using an HP-48G too in the last year of primary school. When my secondary school forbade graphical calculators, I switched to a HP-15C that my dad had bought for his PhD in the early 80s. Fellow students used to make fun of RPN, a calculator without = sign was mindblowing for them. I finished the university entrance math test in 12 min. This was mid 2000s. Lots of nasty calculations. Graphical calculators were banned too. They naively thought non-graphical calculators can't do numerical linear algebra or analysis. But a 15C is one of a kind. Second hand units are still crazy expensive.
- singron 7y ago
  I used a TI-89 (which has a CAS) on the AP Calculus exam. I maybe used it to double check an answer, but I don't remember it being more useful than a TI-83 on that exam. You can only use calculators on part of the exam. On the calculator portion, I remember formulating each problem to be the hard part and the actual differentiation/integration was straightforward. The SAT math is so rudimentary that it's difficult to use a calculator beyond its basic arithmetic functionality (unless it's been changed since I took it). I bet most people would get similar scores with and without calculators. In college, calculators were never allowed in exams. They just constructed each exam problem so that you didn't need to perform arithmetic with large numbers. It does make it seem like exams were written to sell calculators...
K2h 7y ago
agreed. years ago, I saw the casio fx-115ms ($15) used on the professional engineering exam (California) as a good dumb calculator. looks like the fx-115ES Plus is the modern equivalent.
tzs 7y ago
I believe that they dictate specific models so that the proctors can learn in advance how to verify that the calculator is not being used to bring in outside notes. It's unreasonable to only allow models from one manufacturer, but dictating specific models for each allowed manufacturer is not unreasonable.
krick 7y ago
Schools are the real problem here. After all, you don't get triggered by the fact, that there are very specific books every student has to buy for the course, do you? I think you should.
- la_barba 7y ago
  You haven't described what the problem actually is with schools. Homogenized knowledge systems are a simple way of having a common "API Layer" in our consciousness that other humans can access.
la_barba 7y ago
I don't think its a "racket". The thing with stuff like this is that nobody wants to be on the hook for re-certifying every single calculator as "equivalent".

gnulinux 7y ago

When I was taking my AP finals, the school I'll attend them in gave me a list of models they will accept. My school does NOT have AP system, so I had to take it in a different school (which is the only school supports it in my country), thus I had 0 leverage. I didn't have one of the calculators they allow (some other Casio model), I called them and they told me I'll be rejected to take the exam. I had to buy another calculator just to take the final. Even though it's almost 100% same as the calculator I had. Miserable.

bby 7y ago
damn bro
fwip 7y ago
That sucks. In my experience, kids who didn't have them were offered loaners for the duration of the test.
- gnulinux 7y ago
  They told me that's a possibility but (1) I didn't wanna be stuck with a foreign/sucky calculator in my Calculus BC test since it has parts that require you to use a calculator and (2) they said there is no guarantee, so I didn't wanna take my chances (what if I'm late and they're out of all extra calculators)

smolder 7y ago

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.

jerf 7y ago

"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/symbolic/integration/integral.html http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/calculus/sage/symb...

nextos 7y ago
I started using an HP-48G too in the last year of primary school. When my secondary school forbade graphical calculators, I switched to a HP-15C that my dad had bought for his PhD in the early 80s. Fellow students used to make fun of RPN, a calculator without = sign was mindblowing for them. I finished the university entrance math test in 12 min. This was mid 2000s. Lots of nasty calculations. Graphical calculators were banned too. They naively thought non-graphical calculators can't do numerical linear algebra or analysis. But a 15C is one of a kind. Second hand units are still crazy expensive.
singron 7y ago
I used a TI-89 (which has a CAS) on the AP Calculus exam. I maybe used it to double check an answer, but I don't remember it being more useful than a TI-83 on that exam. You can only use calculators on part of the exam. On the calculator portion, I remember formulating each problem to be the hard part and the actual differentiation/integration was straightforward. The SAT math is so rudimentary that it's difficult to use a calculator beyond its basic arithmetic functionality (unless it's been changed since I took it). I bet most people would get similar scores with and without calculators. In college, calculators were never allowed in exams. They just constructed each exam problem so that you didn't need to perform arithmetic with large numbers. It does make it seem like exams were written to sell calculators...

K2h 7y ago

agreed. years ago, I saw the casio fx-115ms ($15) used on the professional engineering exam (California) as a good dumb calculator. looks like the fx-115ES Plus is the modern equivalent.

tzs 7y ago

I believe that they dictate specific models so that the proctors can learn in advance how to verify that the calculator is not being used to bring in outside notes. It's unreasonable to only allow models from one manufacturer, but dictating specific models for each allowed manufacturer is not unreasonable.

krick 7y ago

Schools are the real problem here. After all, you don't get triggered by the fact, that there are very specific books every student has to buy for the course, do you? I think you should.

la_barba 7y ago
You haven't described what the problem actually is with schools. Homogenized knowledge systems are a simple way of having a common "API Layer" in our consciousness that other humans can access.

la_barba 7y ago

I don't think its a "racket". The thing with stuff like this is that nobody wants to be on the hook for re-certifying every single calculator as "equivalent".