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Comment by billfruit | Hacker News Reader

It has been a great wonder for me that why US highschools seems to require expensive programmable/graphing calculators especially those made by HP/TI. I assume it was some deal made by these companies with the education departments of the states and administrations.

In most other countries, students complete university undergraduate courses, let alone high schools with only needing a cheap non-programmable calculator, while some courses like an undergraduate course in Computer Science wouldn't require any calculator at all.

Why this American exceptionalism?

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UK too. I had to have a graphing programmable calculator for A levels in the 90s (16-18 year old). My college bulk bought them and sold them to us for a huge discount. I can't remember if they were sharp or casio. At the start of exams you had to erase the memory and show the invigilator.

Those things ate batteries!

If you hit them on the back the outside cover of the screen would pop off. I found drawing a graph on the back of the screen in dry wipe marker, and then popping it back in, was a hilarious trick. People would rub like mad thinking someone had drawn it in the permanent marker (I would leave a permanent marker next to it to help them get the idea).

I always messed around (or snoozed)in maths class, and still got an A. It was much later that I realised I actually had a learning difficulty...

As a student, it always felt like a mixture of "better to have it and not need it" and bog standard corruption.

Most teachers didn't use the advanced featutes, disliked that students played games on them during class, and had to jump through hoops to tamp down on cheating during exams. Many parents also had difficulty finding an extra $130 per child to pay for them; the schools wouldn't provide returnable ones like they did with textbooks.

In contrast, when I went to college (also in the US), we got a simple one-line "+-*/^" calculator for the first few years of calculus, engineering maths, etc.

Personally, I learned much better with the simple calculator. Complex graphing calculators do seem more suited to professional use than education.

Outside of education (where your lobbyists can ensure they are required by all students), there really are very few use cases for a complex graphing calculator. If you have access to a computer, Octave, Maxima, and Python (or any non-free equivalent) will run rings around any graphing calculator. For field use, the only point in favor of a graphing calculator as opposed to a phone app seems to be ruggedness.

There was a podcast that touches on this - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/28/642675050/hurr...

This was the case in Australia in the 2000s. A basic scientific calculator was all that was allowed for the highest grade of maths. Graphing or advanced symbolic features were not allowed.

Germany has plenty schools that use graphing/CAS calculators too. You typically borrow it from the school, so cost doesn't really matter.

I bought a TI calculator after reading Americans rave about them, and I used it for a while to try and get the hang of it, but the interface really sucks compared to my Casio, so now I just use the Casio. I don't see what's so great about TI calculators.

You can compare the Casio interface with a web-mask. Plug in p and q and get the solutions to your quadratic equation. If there is no mask, you're out of luck.

The TIs instead work on the basis of functions like from a programming library. Their equivalent might be a BASH shell with pipes. That is cumbersome on the first glance but incomparably more powerful. You can chain an arbitrary amount of functions.

I once finished a 3-hour exam in 20 min since most of the questions could be translated to a like 5-lines long function-chain that took like a minute to calculate on 10 MHz but were correct in the end.

Well, at least in France, those expensive graphing calculators are mandatory in high school and later if you choose to study sciences.

Some of it is to avoid "cheating" (not using a computer during exams, a new "exam mode" was also recently mandated, with a flashing LED). But I am not sure why calculators are still that expensive today: https://xkcd.com/768/

That, while you can buy a linux-compatible processor for a few dollars, slap python or GNU Octave on it and call it a day.

I think it's in part due to the certification process taking quite a bit of time. Even new incumbents such as https://www.numworks.com/ have relatively poor specs at a high price by today's standards.

We should just treat cheating as a skill, as those people will get ahead first anyway.

Until they can't cheat, then they can't do anything because they never learned how to do it. Bad idea.

One day I will learn to not use humor or sarcasm on HN. Or, God forbid, cast a shade on Peter Thiel.

"Cheating as a Service" is far more common that everyone learning how to cheat.

You can still cheat with the programming ones by making cheat sheet programs.

Yeah, that's what the "exam mode" is about: to lock down access to the calculator memory, and advanced funtionality like CAS. From what I read, it:

- Disables memory access or erases it

- Disables data transmission

- Lights an indicator

- Can't be disable without physically connecting another calculator or computer. I think some even beep.

Well, of course back then I did an extensive job of using the built-in memory for my "cheat sheets", even building programs with submenus for quick access, and some automated functionality. I don't feel like it really hindered me later. At least, it taught me more about programming :)

I had to buy a TI-86 in 1992; 8th grade math. I still have it, use it almost every day, and love it.

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