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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 exam
by jmcphers 7y ago
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).
- jedberg 7y agoMost 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".
- bsamuels 7y agoThe 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.
- jedberg 7y agoI 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. :)
- JohnBooty 7y agoI went to high school in the early 90s, at the dawn of graphing calculators but before teachers were wise to the "notes" trick. One time before a calc test I dropped my graphing calculator. The battery door popped off and the batteries popped out. The unit was otherwise unharmed... but my cheat sheet in the notes app was gone! I nearly crapped my pants. Luckily though... as most cheaters know... to make a decent cheat sheet you actually have to comprehend the material first. Half the time you wind up not even using your cheat sheet. Luckily for me that was the case. I still did well on the test.
- mmcgaha 7y agoI am a little older than you, so my cheat sheets were on paper. There was definitely something about miniaturizing notes that reinforced learning. I made dozens of cheat sheets but never had to use one.
- JohnBooty 7y agoYeah, the vast majority of mine were on paper! There was definitely something about miniaturizing notes that reinforced learning We have to comprehend a thing in order to summarize it, right? The more compact the summary, the more comprehension required. =)
- logfromblammo 7y agoI also did this, but never got around to storing test-related materials in my phone. It was mainly for preserving my goofing-off programs.
- logfromblammo 7y agoNot phone. Calculator.
- lb1lf 7y agoWhen 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 cheat - but that would be unlikely to succeed...)
- macintux 7y agoI’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.
- dillonmckay 7y ago48?
- macintux 7y agoI’m actually not sure I still have my 48. I have one of the new limited edition 15s and an ancient 41.
- ttul 7y agoAn HP 48 put me through engineering school. I now own an HP Prime. Sweet piece of hardware. Of course, I have no use for it anymore.
- lb1lf 7y agoOh, we had one approved graphing calculator - well, two. The Casio FX-7700 and its big brother, the FX-9700. Problem solved. Except if you happened to prefer RPN; I had a HP-48 which I had bought prior to the edict naming The One True Calculator - the day I enrolled at university, I started using it again, only to be met with a similar edict in my second term, naming the Ti-89 the only kosher graphing calculator. Since I graduated, the HP-48 has been in daily use.
- avgDev 7y agoI did this. Oddly enough in a computer science class we had an old professor. He accused me of cheating. He was right. However, he physically inspected my calculator like under the cover and where batteries are lol but did not check the programs. He apologized. I did well on the test.
- LgWoodenBadger 7y agoI'm having trouble figuring out what type of material in Computer Science would require a calculator.
- avgDev 7y agoIt was weird. It was a course that had some assembly language and I'm pretty sure he wanted us to do some calculations. We were writing the code on paper, therefore, he allowed calculators.
- walshemj 7y agoBase conversions maybe for an entry level course
- saagarjha 7y agoI had a problem on a test that asked to track a somewhat convoluted series of recursive calls. Being lazy, I reimplemented it in TI-BASIC and just ran it…
- filmgirlcw 7y agoYeah, that’s what I did. I also used a TI-89, which was fairly new at the time, and thus, the teachers/proctors weren’t as aware of its features and where to look for stuff that was hidden away.
- mrlambchop 7y agoGuilty as charged. A program that did a <delay,print "RESET",delay> was enough (with a bit of execution timing) to show the examiner on the way into the hall that all was good. The attention to detail really got to me however over time - the normal reset message was in lower case, but all the custom programs could print was in UPPER case. I was always "its sooo obvious - they'll find me out", when I saw RESET, but nobody ever clocked. I never did use these notes or solvers in an exam - once I knew I had them, I would remember them anyway.
- pkaye 7y agoYes 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 worse thing you can request of a professor is to make it an "open book" test. Those tests are always damm hard.
- cydonian_monk 7y agoCheat-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 high school in a tools-based curriculum, so repeating it with just fundamentals was less of a headache than it might've been. And I agree - the simpler the cheat sheet the better of an understanding of the subject the pupil is likely to have.
- whatshisface 7y ago>Now the math department? They were a different story. No calculators. Period. Ever. Made higher-level calculus... interesting. 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.
- spookthesunset 7y agoYup. One clue you were going off course on a test in a high level math class was when all your numbers were getting rather crazy and unwieldy... Usually the same rule applied in physics exams too...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 7y agoIt was always threatened but never actually done in my experience. I had programs for all the formulae we needed to memorize... but also memorized the formulas. I think it is standardized tests where the "clear your memory" would come up, but again, it was never done. I also don't think they asked any questions where the programs would have been an advantage, either. (The thing that's stuck most in my mind is the quadratic formula. The SAT could ask you "find the roots of this equation", but you don't need to know the quadratic formula to do that... the test is multiple choice so you can just multiply their answers and pick the one that matches the question. For that reason, I don't think they ask that kind of question, but I could be wrong. It has been a while.)
- therealrootuser 7y agoThere was the little known, but powerful combo called "GROUP" and "ARCHIVE". GROUP allowed you to package together a set of programs. Archive would allow you to take that group and store it in the long term memory of the calculator. You can then "clear the memory" of the calculator, but can then immediately unarchive the grouped programs and get everything back how it was. That said, I don't recall my teachers ever getting too fussy about having us clear our memory; in fact, iirc one of them actually told us to write programs to handle some of the nastier formulas. Anyway, in my opinion, a good mathematics course should focus less on regurgitation of formulas, and more on problems solving---recognizing which theorems or strategies might apply to a problem and applying them to come up with a result.
- imglorp 7y agoPlus you probably learn more coding the algorithm into a calculator than you would learn regurgitating something from memory. That's a win either way.
- saddestcatever 7y agoYes. For those that actually write the algorithm. For every other student in the class, copying someone else's code doesn't quite have the same benefit.... Students are humans. They will find the path of least resistance...
- vkou 7y agoYou're measured on test scores, not on how much you learned. If the rules say 'no computer assistance', and you break those rules in a way the test monitors didn't expect, the only people you are cheating are other students.
- acjohnson55 7y agoThat was how I justified it to myself when I did this and ran a fake memory cleared / program hiding program on my 83. Sorry not sorry.
- wlesieutre 7y ago
- OGWhales 7y agoI’ve only had one professor that cleared my memory, that and AP exams. But even then, I would archive my programs so that they wouldn’t get deleted during the memory clear. I’ve never seen a professor that knew about archived programs.
- echelon 7y agoI 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.
- notJim 7y agoSo then you'd have to use a calculator you've never used before during a high stakes exam? Doesn't sound good to me.
- macintux 7y agoEspecially if you’re only comfortable with RPN.
- echelon 7y agoIf the calculators are cheap and standard, the tool is not much different from a pencil. If yours doesn't work you can ask for a replacement.
- SkyMarshal 7y agoNot necessarily, presumably students would own the same version and use it during the year, but would have to use the school-owned ones for exams.
- monocasa 7y ago> This also would align with driving costs down since schools will not want to pay $100 per calculator for their student body. Lol, I don't think I've seen that argument made before. They already pay near college prices for the text books.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoWhen the quality of a school is rhetorically judged on its per-pupil spending, obviously administrators will want to pay more, not less, for whatever they happen to purchase.
- asmithmd1 7y agoI tried to cheat this exact same way with a test on the the Newton–Raphson method. My program even showed intermediate values so I could show my work. The professor still got me, I wound up memorizing it because the effort it to write and debug the program.
- clamprecht 7y agoIn prison, only non-programmable calculators were allowed. A friend somehow had gotten a TI-85 in. I programmed it to say "NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR" as its startup message, so they wouldn't take it during a random search. I also wrote a basic stock portfolio manager - this was the only chance I had to program during my 5 years there.
- russfink 7y agoWhy would they care about a calculator?
- Jtsummers 7y agoRules in prisons and other high-security places are often extreme. They start with a simple kernel, which may or may not make sense: No personal computing devices (under the assumption that computing devices can be used for un-controlled communication, this may not have been articulated). Someone asks about people using calculators for their GED or whatever, so they permit them. Someone else realizes calculators can be computers (not in just the basic sense of performing computation, but general computers). They extend the rules but keep the carved out exception for non-programmable calculators.
- esrauch 7y agoThey presumably didn't want people using a TI-83/85 effectively as a gameboy.
- onemoresoop 7y agohttp://tiwizard.com/downloads/ http://tiwizard.com/downloads/
- esrauch 7y agoRight: I meant the prison presumably doesn't want prisoners playing games (as is easy to do on these calculators). I'm actually a little confused that was a controversial thought.
- mobilemidget 7y agoWe even had snake to play on it
- decoyworker 7y agoThis is a contributing factor as to why I'm still shit at math to this day. I'd just spend all class writing programs in the calculator that did the work for me.
- mcphage 7y ago> 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 You're thinking in the wrong direction—testing companies don't really care if you can access notes that you wrote, they don't want you to be able to quickly type up new notes as you take the test. Specifically, they don't want you to be able to copy down the test questions, because they charge money to get old test questions. They don't want the test itself to get out.
- mattbreeden 7y agoYou can do this just as easily as it was to make your original notes
- hamandcheese 7y agoWhich is not particularly easy. No way could anyone both pass a test and copy the questions into a ti84.
- mcphage 7y ago> You can do this just as easily as it was to make your original notes Maybe kids have gotten better at it since I was in school, but text entry on the TI-8x was a laborious process, and calculators with qwerty keyboards (like the TI-92) were quickly banned.
- IIAOPSW 7y agoI had an 84 in high school and didn't even hide that I was doing this and didn't consider it cheating. The way I see it, if you understand the material well enough to program a computer to do it then you have understood the material. Not allowing me to make and use my own automation tool is just artificial difficulty. Now the kids who only used the program function to hide notes, those kids were cheaters. To this day I don't consider myself to have understood something until I can code it.
- Legogris 7y agoFWIW, my university specifically only allowed calculators pre-approved as non-programmable for any exam. 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.
- the_narrator 7y agoThis was common and well known even in the mid 90's with the TI-82. So much so that when my high school calculus class mostly bombed a test, the instructor asked us how we could have possibly failed his test when we were all using "notes" on our calculator.
- willis936 7y agoI did this in emag instead of bothering with the grad, curl, laplacian, and spherical coordinate conversion by hand. I did them by hand in vector calc. All I’d be doing by doing it by hand is introducing room for error.
- selimthegrim 7y agoThe real way to do this is using differential forms so you just have matrices that you read off. Using the appropriate metric and the normalized form you don't need to memorize anything (see section 5 of https://www.math.arizona.edu/~faris/methodsweb/manifold.pdf https://www.math.arizona.edu/~faris/methodsweb/manifold.pdf)
- jabl 7y agoI learned EM the traditional way with vector calculus, but I regret I never got around to properly learn it formulated via one of the generalizations like geometric algebra or differential forms. Oh well, maybe someone will write a magnus opus EM book using differential forms to rival Jackson's book, and the next generation of students can learn it.
- selimthegrim 7y agoI think Zangwill mentions it
- ransom1538 7y agoUgh. You miss the point. It is the internet that is the issue.
- jmb12686 7y agoI can also confirm that it was easy to store "notes" and write programs for TI calculators. The ability to store arbitrary ascii characters saved my butt on quite a few exams in the 2000s. Not quite sure which TI calculator I had, but I want to say 83+?