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High school students taking the digital SAT get near-full access to Desmos throughout the math portion of the test (it’s a modified version, but you get access

High school students taking the digital SAT get near-full access to Desmos throughout the math portion of the test (it’s a modified version, but you get access to practically everything). It’s very powerful, and if you can use it effectively, you can brute force hard questions in seconds. Graphing calculators have been available during the SAT in the past, but Desmos is something else… I wonder how it effects score distributions/question difficulty.

varun_ch 2y ago
and on the topic of calculators in high school maths, the NumWorks calculator is so far ahead of the TI-84 despite being allowed on the same tests. It honestly feels like an advantage over my peers… it can literally do more, and faster. It was a big shock when I realized handheld calculators don’t have to suck. Highly recommend.
- jchw 2y ago
  On the TI-84, there was a lot of great third-party software you could load onto the calculator. When I was in school, I had a fair few useful and not-so-useful things loaded onto my TI-84, including a copy of Symbolic, which gave the TI-84 some limited symbolic calculus functionality. I don't remember much else of what I had. Rather than use the calculator to help with repetitive math, though, what I really wound up doing most of the time is messing around in TI Basic instead of doing my work.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    I got in trouble for programming on my calculator in my high school computer class, lol
    - jchw 2y ago
      I spent a long time trying to figure out how to make TI Basic programs fast enough to do games. Graph drawing commands were too slow! I realized that for most things text was the right way to go, but eventually I did manage to make a facsimile of Pong that was decently fast in graph mode by simply drawing each frame incrementally rather than clearing and redrawing it each time. Pretty obvious in retrospect, but I was still relatively new to programming when I first started messing with TI Basic. I also struggled to write shared routines with only goto, so my code was a catastrophic mess. I assume most TI Basic code was, though.
saagarjha 2y ago
Ooh, that’s pretty neat! When I took the SAT (not all that long ago) they wouldn’t even let me bring in my TI-89 :( Out of spite I used my fx-115 ES-PLUS through it instead (which is honestly better in most ways, despite being a scientific calculator).

varun_ch 2y ago

and on the topic of calculators in high school maths, the NumWorks calculator is so far ahead of the TI-84 despite being allowed on the same tests. It honestly feels like an advantage over my peers… it can literally do more, and faster. It was a big shock when I realized handheld calculators don’t have to suck. Highly recommend.

jchw 2y ago
On the TI-84, there was a lot of great third-party software you could load onto the calculator. When I was in school, I had a fair few useful and not-so-useful things loaded onto my TI-84, including a copy of Symbolic, which gave the TI-84 some limited symbolic calculus functionality. I don't remember much else of what I had. Rather than use the calculator to help with repetitive math, though, what I really wound up doing most of the time is messing around in TI Basic instead of doing my work.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  I got in trouble for programming on my calculator in my high school computer class, lol
  - jchw 2y ago
    I spent a long time trying to figure out how to make TI Basic programs fast enough to do games. Graph drawing commands were too slow! I realized that for most things text was the right way to go, but eventually I did manage to make a facsimile of Pong that was decently fast in graph mode by simply drawing each frame incrementally rather than clearing and redrawing it each time. Pretty obvious in retrospect, but I was still relatively new to programming when I first started messing with TI Basic. I also struggled to write shared routines with only goto, so my code was a catastrophic mess. I assume most TI Basic code was, though.

saagarjha 2y ago

Ooh, that’s pretty neat! When I took the SAT (not all that long ago) they wouldn’t even let me bring in my TI-89 :( Out of spite I used my fx-115 ES-PLUS through it instead (which is honestly better in most ways, despite being a scientific calculator).