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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I searched for graphing calculator apps on iOS the other day and found a ton that simply attempt to recreate the TI-84, e.g. [1].

So anyone with high school kids: are they still buying $100 physical calculators? Or are they just using free/cheap apps?

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/graphing-calculator-x84/id1247...

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I'm a few years out of high school, but during my time anything other than physical calculators were explicitly banned due to the potential for kids to be accessing the internet during exams. I even had a friend who won one of TI's higher end calculators at a math competition, only for him to be banned to use it during exams because of its higher capabilities. Perhaps things have changed in the post-Covid world.

In my high school physics and math classes, we were allowed to run any programs that we programmed ourselves. This was on Ti-84s so BASIC not Python.

Given the context, it made a lot of sense.

Yeah about the same here. I wrote some programs to handle quadratic formulas. Impressed the Algebra teacher who then let me take AP Computer Science so I can learn to program in Java...which I promptly forgot after graduating HS.

When I was in HS, at the exams we were expected to use our TI-84+ calculators, but we were not allowed to have any programs of our own, so they made us clear the programs before they handed out the problems.

Which you could work around by archiving and then unarchiving the programs. I remember having to do a soft factory reset for one class before exams, rather than just clearing programs. At least they took the policy to its logical extension

There's no way they let you take the SAT with your phone out. Acceptable calculators are actually enumerated though there's more than I realized. https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-tes...

I'm really surprised that the open source NumWorks calculator is on that list! Also the RadioShack / Casio EC-4033 programmable from the 1980s...

Just graduated secondary school in April. Just as a someone said in a reply below, anything other than a physical calculator is still banned during assessments. There are tools like Desmos, GeoGebra, etc... that may be used by the instructor and students during lessons though. Although it's strange, there is no explicit rule provided by our Mathematics faculty that bans higher functioning calculators I've only seen one person carrying one.

That's what I did 10 years ago when my TI-89 broke right before my Linear Algebra final. I somehow convinced my instructor that when I had my phone out, I was actually using the calculator on my phone.

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