To be fair I understand where the college board is coming from. Any effort to be able to add custom software is also a way to add software not approved by the c

To be fair I understand where the college board is coming from. Any effort to be able to add custom software is also a way to add software not approved by the college board, which is obviously an easy way to cheat on tests. And a light that goes on if you enter "exam mode" isn't enough, because if the calculator has the ability to replace the firmware (as the mathworks calculator had) you can disable the exam mode light. The only possible thing I can think of is a light that comes on when the user tries to access the part of flash memory that custom programs are stored in. If you implemented this in hardware then it would not be possible to disable that exam light, even with a firmware update. That being said, there was no reason to continue to use those same shitty screens for decades; I'm glad they've moved away from those now. They do still use a Z80 CPU but it's a modernized version that runs at a much higher clock speed, so that's also not too much of a downside.