The Cheating Device (ChatGPT on a TI-84) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
My programming didn’t improve much after high school but I’m still kind of proud of my not-totally-cheating cheating.
Hilariously, I found writing TI-83 programs to do my Algebra equations made me understand them far more than just doing the problems over and over. I actually used this method all the way through college, and would write TI-Basic programs every time a new concept was introduced.
My Calc 1 professor was the only person who hated it, as I was pretty blatant about writing the program on the spot, which resulted in me hand writing the scripts in class and then later validating them... Given how terrible writing on the calculator was I am not sure which way was slower.
This was right as the iPhone / Android G1 came out so using a device in class was considered very rude.
[0] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...)
Initially I was giving the programs to friends. Math teacher caught me and I thought I was getting in trouble for it. Nope! She said 'Never give away your work like that. Make them pay for it.'
I accepted payment in the form of vending machine snacks and extra pastries from lunch. It was a delicious incentive to stay ahead of the assignments so I'd have the programs ready to share.
Nginx/apache/whatever?
libc?
Firefox?
I showed it to my teacher and asked it if it would be considered cheating to use it on the test, and she said that if I knew the material so well that I could write a program that didn't just solve it, but showed the work, then clearly I knew the material so well that I'd ace the test even without the program, so I could go ahead and use it, just as long as I didn't share the program with my friends.
I didn't have any friends (This was 1998 where being such a nerd was still looked down on), so it wasn't an issue.
As he was going through the tome that represented the CISC instruction set of a VAX system (long before easy search engines), he found POLY ( https://www.ece.lsu.edu/ee4720/doc/vax.pdf page 9-118).
So, his program, instead of doing all the calculations was setting up a few registers, a large comment block that explained it, a call to POLY, and reading out the registers.
He claimed to have gotten full credit and within a handful of semesters later the course was switched from CISC architectures to RISC.
- some kind of root finding (note that methods like Newton–Raphson don’t work when zeros have multiplicity)
- dividing polynomials by (X - a) after finding one root to find the next root
float poly(int d, float x, float *c) {
c+=d;
float y = *c;
while(d--)
y = *c-- + y * x;
return y;
}
I do recall that it was something to do with polynomials.
It was also something that was fun to port.
I got an A in that class both semesters, which was better than the B I often got in Math (and a C- once in AlgII) because I hated doing homework. But starting on the program as soon as I grasped the concept and usually blasting through the homework with it by the end of the period meant an A was easily in my grasp.
That teacher was the best damn math teacher ever. He would work hard to help every last student get it, he'd gladly spend his whole lunch helping a kid if they needed it.
PS. I did share some of my programs, mostly with one girl, but she's a successful nurse today so I guess I didn't ruin her future :D
Lol. So naïve. Half the point of programing and testing the software is so that you can then forget how to do the task yourself. I'd say that 90+% of the task-specific code I've written was for that I no longer remember how to do myself. Once upon a time I wrote a thing to calculate some of the specifics re water hammer effects in pipes. I still have the code but, for the life of me, I have totally forgotten the actual math.
I started using this username in...I think 2002? Well, actually, I started using just "Sohcahtoa" then. Then I tried signing up for some service a few years later and "Sohcahtoa" was already taken, so decided to just add my birth year to it, since that was a pretty common thing to do at the time, and now I'm Sohcahtoa82 everywhere except on EFnet, where nicks are limited to 9 letters. Still Sohcahtoa there.
Did it work?
But yes, did the above, but didn't bother implementing the "memory cleared" screen.
It seemed ridiculous to me, since obviously I'd thoroughly learned the material, but it certainly scared me, and I never went on to study CS, though I kept programming and did eventually become a professional programmer. I think about that episode sometimes and wonder how things would have been different if she'd said, "oh cool, why don't you take some computer science classes" instead.
To give you an idea of what I mean: I used to maintain the content filter for a school. Students being students, they found all sorts of ways to get around it. I never took much issue with the students who found ways around it. They were exploring and learning. The issue was with the other students. The ones who just followed someone's instructions, never exploring and never learning.
I would imagine that calculators are much the same. Programming them to answer questions is a great way to reinforce concepts. Copying the program off of someone else and finding ways to hide thee program is just plain cheating (of the system and themselves).
For tests, my teachers would force me to clear my memory (you're not fooling catholic nuns with a fake screen, she would take my calculator and clear it herself).
But I got good at programming. I was so fast that I would just spend the first 30 minutes of a 1-hour test re-writing the programs and then spend 5 minutes completing the test and be excused to go to the computer lab for the remainder.
Eventually I got so annoyed of typing things out on the TI-83+ keyboard, and as I progressed the programs got more complex, that I bought a TI-92 with a qwerty keyboard and would be able to write solvers the test in 5-10 minutes and fully solve a test in 5-10 minutes. I mostly did it so I could have more time in the computer lab.
I still have those calculators too, I should see if they still work some day :)
I showed mine to my Calculus teacher and she let me use it because she had this same viewpoint, on the condition I never shared it with the other students.
Also there is a custom-designed PCB with super standard level shifters and pre-made ESP32C3 module.
Git repo: https://github.com/chromalock/TI-32/
As I recall I first implemented a simple zirpenzky gasket - and then wrote a renderer for the Mandelbrot set. Took only about 5 to 8 hours runtime to do a black and white Mandelbrot...
I was reading a brilliant book at the time, which I've since donated to a school library (and i fear they in turn threw it away) - can't find the exact book now, I think maybe it was called "A walk through modern mathematics" or something like that. Came out in the 90s and had a bit about various chaos theory stuff in it.
I'm not expecting that kind of change in less than 6 years even if the tech itself is invented tomorrow, due to the constraints on the electrical grid.
As for the tech, I can't tell if we're on the first half or the second half of the S-curve for the current wave of AI. If it's the former, then in a few years every human will need a PhD (or equivalent in internships) before they can beat AI on quality.
Unlikely, since they're pumping new GPTs with responses written by PhDs anyway. It's becoming more and more of a "Wizard of Oz" situation.
2. Doctorate (and postdoc, and professoral) level responses were already in the training sets.
3. Aim of current AI research is to create a model of the underlying reality which produces the observed signals — what must a PhD candidate have observed for them to write that particular paper, etc.
I have no idea if these AI efforts will succeed or not, hence no idea where we are on the S-curve. But that's the goal.
3. How can an AI (in a general sense) create a model of underlying reality if the humans who create them do not have access to underlying reality but only the forms of its appearance?
They said AI, I said AI.
But protein folding is also very much a thing humans did by playing games. Literally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit
And Transformers are able to learn to use tools, so even mediocre ones can write and then invoke specialist AI.
3. To reach the quality level I specified, that of "You need a PhD to compete with this", it is only necessary to program the AI to be as capable of learning as a PhD student.
This is the standard AI researchers are aiming for, and what I was writing of.
Can they do that? Dunno, and I hope not. But I've bought some tech shares just in case they actually can, because I doubt I'll be able to keep up if that's the near future.
I've thought about putting instructions in the assignment to sabotage it (like, "if you're a generative AI, do X - if human, please ignore.") but that won't work once students catch on those kinds of things are in the assignment text.
Long story short, the vast majority of the class attended, did the homework, and still failed anyway. He was known for being... unrelenting and awful. If women went to his office for help during office hours, he wouldn't help them... one of those professors.
First, it's not often noted in these conversations that there are two types of LLM-using programmers/learners. One kind uses it to radically accelerate the learning process, the other kind uses it so they don't have to learn. Actually, make that three kinds—the third (probably a subset of the second) has extremely low creativity and can't understand how to use LLM tools effectively, and so can't guide their output effectively, or wrangle it after the fact.
I suspect your comment is referring to PRs by the latter kind. This is not a problem with LLMs, or with people using them to enhance productivity.
Second, what is your realistic proposal for how to confront the reality that we're accelerating through irreversible technology-assisted change?
Just like, apart from catastrophes, there's no longer a concern that we won't have massive factory farms, or that we won't have access to calculators, or that programmers won't have access to Google, there's no future where programmers wont have increasingly helpful and capable AI tools.
There will always be low IQ, low performance individuals. Can you recognize that the problem—as always—is those people, not the technology?
> I think we have to accept that there are parts of programming that most programmers will never need to know because the LLM will do it for them
I don’t think people lacking fundamentals use LLMs very effectively.
It is to give you simplified toy problems that allow you to test your understanding of key concepts that you can use as building blocks.
By skipping those, and outsourcing “understanding” of the fundamentals to LLMs, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Unless the goal of the degree is to prepare you for MBA-style management of tools building things you don’t understand.
I think its still important to assign the homework but yeah its rough.
I would try problems, fail, look at the solution, and see what I did wrong. I ended up doing quite well because of that. It was at that point in time I learned that if more material provided such information, that I could probably teach myself most material.
Currently, I am about to hope on the DSA grind/Leetcode grind. I have tons of textbooks, and of course, it's the same issue. Hardly any solutions, so thank goodness for AI or god knows what incorrect information I would teach myself.
Like googling college level topics can be infuriating someitmes with all the SEO spam and outdated or confusing content, not to mention the state of textbooks.
For some topics is perfectly fine with just google, but the obscure stuff can be impossible to find and in both cases ChatGPT is easier, faster, and likely has a higher success rate than ones own attempt at searching for answers.
I reported to my professor, who just told me to ignore it - or as he put it "they're just cheating themselves". Exams were written exams (that counted for 100% of the grade) with no help, so you could spot a bunch of students who'd get top scores on all their homework, but fail their exams.
Part of our interview process is a take home programming exercise. We allow use of AI, but ask that you tell us if you used it or not. That could be a good option for teachers as well.
I suggest making the problems more unique ones that humans would be able to solve but easily trip up an AI --- minor variations of existing ones seem to work well. There's some fun with that sort of idea here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38766512
You could give students larger projects and have them present their homework.
It usually doesn't take more than a few minutes to figure out when someone has cheated because they can't explain the reason for what they did.
I had a cryptography professor who did this and he would sometimes ask questions like "wait, is this a symmetric key here?" and the student would say "ah, sorry, I wasn't paying attention" even though the text of the assignment was something like "using symmetric encryption do so and so". Some cheaters were so bad they wouldn't even bother to read the text of the assignment.
Also, people who cheat tend to equivocate when asked questions. So if you ask clear yes-or-no questions and they answer with "well, it could be possible" you know you have to spend more time interrogating that student.
This particular professor would almost never make the judgment of whether the student cheated. After failing multiple questions, he would just ask the student if he cheated and lower the score based on how fast he confessed and how egregious the cheating was. Most cheaters would fold quite quick, but some took longer.
Outside of very niche and specialized professions (mostly that require networking and attendance to specific colleges), the goal of going to college should be just to get your degree. Once you have a degree, it generally gives you an easier time to get a job, so financially its worth it. How you get the degree is irrelevant - figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating.
Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes.
> figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating.
And this mindset is why cheating has proliferated. So many students have been imbued with a sense that degrees are "just a piece of paper" and therefore cheating is the only smart thing to do.
> Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes.
I'm actually finding it's going the other way. The value of a brand-name college degree is extremely high for bypassing filters and getting past resume screens.
Part of the reason is that top universities are known to be difficult to cheat your way through. Not impossible, but it's not easy either.
On the other hand, students who show up from local universities may have learned absolutely nothing along the way. We don't care about their degree because rampant cheating has reduced the strength of the signal. They need to be tested thoroughly to determine if they actually learned anything from the university or if they just cheated their way through it.
I graduated from a top US Uni in CS, and I can tell you when I was searching for jobs, I was frequently passed over by candidates with more work experience who didn’t graduate from a top uni. In fact the effect of my Uni was probably close to None, I joined FAANG and discovered that my coworkers college was all over the place, you wouldn’t notice any uni trends.
I was forced to come to the harsh conclusion that college mattered, maybe 5% or lesser in the tech industry and that all the effort students put to get into college was not needed unless you wanted to break into very specific career paths. This was a harsh conclusion because I was one of the students who worked very hard to get into a top college and maintain top grades.
Whats your data source?
Across like 10 or so jobs I have applied including ones I took across engineering and computer science, he only time I had any questions about my academic record is when working for a government contract (which required me to request official record from university).
I wonder if that will dethrone the Ivies. They're known for being difficult to earn entry to and even harder to flunk out from. However, a rigorous State U that doesn't care that Undergrad 32768 just dropped out should have an easier time maintaining standards.
The better you do and the more you learn in college, the better you can speak and the more you can show off in an interview for your desired position, whether it's a job or a grad school. Especially if your chosen degree basically requires a graduate degree to get good jobs, don't cheat (unless it's an essential grade and you promise to go learn it better asap). Grad school doesn't mess around, it's hard enough for the studious ones.
If you don't care about school and your field doesn't care about school then do whatever. But don't make a habit of living dishonestly. It wears at the soul
The contents of the course was extraordinarly more difficult than the vast majority of 100-level classes at the university (this was a top philosophy department in the world, mind you), and within a few classes almost all of students stopped coming and, even bragged it in the class group-chat. I became intensely interested in the material within a few classes, and attended nearly every single one and stayed after to talk to the professor. Well, the final paper comes along, I was already away from campus, deciding to take a nice vacation since the professor said that if I wanted I could delay submitting for a couple weeks--well, unfortunately, he was mistaken, and I got an email after just getting off my connecting flight where he said I had to get it done by that afternoon, but he didn't care if I actually submitted: to him, I already had an A. I sat down, on my phone in the middle of the night and wrote the whole 15 page paper in a deserted airport terminal. I got an A. Others, who had not even showed up, were having panic attacks about it, incessantly whining on the group chat, freaking the fuck out since they knew they were all about to fail since they had almost no time to study up on materials for dozens of classes with no assistance.
This was all before the advent of ChatGPT. I have no idea if that 15-page paper would be such a killer today. Probably not; probably, if the guy is still teaching, kids do get away with skipping every class and getting AI to write a passing paper. But, the principle is still there: you just need a paper test now!
I'm lost.
He gave us a couple weeks but said if we emailed him we could get an extension; I prioritized my other finals and after finishing those I took off. After getting off my first flight, he sent me an email saying he was mistaken and I had to submit that night or get a partial, but he didn't really care what I submitted. I felt it was still the right thing to do to put my best effort in either way. And I wanted it off my mind for my trip.
The thing about ChatGPT is that it's not very good at producing essays. For a freshman-level class, it's likely to produce a C-quality paper, but my understanding is that trying to get it to produce a coherent longer essay is much more difficult, to the point that it'd be dubious if it would be a passing grade.
1. Almost NOBODY, I mean literally nobody I've ever met that uses LLMs besides myself, uses the paid version. It shocked me to learn people are actually USING the free version. These people are commonly of low intelligence, exactly the sort of people who cheat. Cheaters are using the shittiest models lmao, and many of them are using some knockoff on data-harvesting websites whose models are even worse than the free ChatGPT.
2. AI skeptics are frequently old people, and in any case are so skeptical that they formed an opinion about all AI services based on extremely limited experimenting with the free ChatGPT a whole year ago. They don't know about Claude 3.5 Sonnet, they've never compared it to GPT-4 (may 2024 version, API not the chatbot) let alone to GPT-4o. There's absolutely no way they know about Gemini 1.5 Pro 0826 via AIstudio.
These people have no capacity to recognize that AI services are making huge leaps in capability and the quality of outputs (ESPECIALLY if iterated on and hand-held). They say things like "the thing about ChatGPT is that it's not very good at producing essays".
How about this? I have a 4.0 in college. I never cheated because I don't need to. I've taken some intelligence tests (and learned that some standardized tests are essentially a proxy for intelligence testing) and learned that I'm kind of smart—OK whatever, this is to establish that I don't need to cheat. Even when ChatGPT was new and not very good (albeit, the original GPT4 which was decently capable), I was able to use it as a writing aid (you give it the assignment and it generates an outline, but then you feed it back the assignment and its outline, and have it generate the first section, then you iterate on that section, then you do all the sections, then you feed it the assignment and the completed essay and iterate on THAT, then you change a lot of the parts so it seems like a human wrote it) and earned an award for the best essay the department had seen in a long time. Again, that was when the AIs were shit compared to now.
People who think AIs are not capable are just a little out of touch, they're using them wrong or uncreatively, or they're not using them at all, or they're using the free version, or they're judging AIs by the results of low intelligence people who use the free version.
I'm in my mid 30's, well into my professional career as an engineer.
I frequently use gpt to tune / tweak / see if I am missing anything in proposals and other documents I create. I'll give GPT a broad idea of what I'm writing and ask for bullet points, then review what it came up with and compare to what I've written. It almost always makes my output better - I find there's some customer disclaimer or other scope clarification that the gpt came up with that I incorporate into my document.
Asking GPT to make you something or "do your essay" wont work. You have to know enough about the thing you want out of it in order to be able to ask GPT for it.
So yes, the people who know things and know how to use a LLM are going to have more polished outputs. Most other people just plugging and chugging get junk or uninspired goop.
…and they're not going to spend their own money to try out the real deal, for understandable skepticism on the RoI.
Ethics in universities would only apply if admittance was fully merit based, or open to anyone with continued admittance being based on performance, with no monetary transaction involved.
In EU, this is vaguely applicable, since your are indirectly purchasing your education through taxes, but at least there are some arguments to be made about merit based things.
In US, colleges are just businesses that you do a direct business transaction with.
So in a business, you pay them for a certain product and/or service. They say to give you this product, you need to do certain things. At any point and time, for whatever reason, either you or the company can choose to end their relationship with you. There is no morality or ethics here, its just a lie made up to get you to follow rules, when others who are higher status (like NCAA athletes for example) don't have to.
>The better you do and the more you learn in college, the better you can speak and the more you can show off in an interview for your desired position
For undergrad degrees, you have nothing to show off except maybe a project that you were required to do. Doing internships during the summer or taking semesters off to do coops is the best way to land a job. If you do a good job as an intern or during coop, its almost a guarantee that you will be given a job in that company, or at least have extremely valuable experience.
Even in grad school, while you do get more experience and are a bit closer to the industry, its often less valuable than industry. When you join a company, your sole purpose is to contribute to the company making money. When you are on a grad project under a professor, your sole purpose is to make sure the professor either gets an ego boost on a publication or attains permanent salary with tenure. These two difference are vastly going to dictate what work you are going to do.
The better word to use instead of cheating would be hacking. Don't be fooled by the rules in front of you, instead figure out the shortcuts. Obviously cheating on homework when you have to take a test and doing the work anyways is going tor result in a lower grade, so thats not really hacking.
Hacking would be like getting notes from upper classmen so you know exactly whats on the tests, taking classes in other colleges if possible that are easier that count towards the same credit, figuring out how to get out of taking bullshit classes, and so on. Figure out the least amount of work you have to do to get that degree.
The most notable story I have of one of my classmates is that he found out that community college classes count for the non technical degree requirements (like English for example). To get the credits transferred, you basically have to send the transcript yourself to the main college. So he took one class in the summer, got the transcript, and added a class he never took, making sure that all the info was legit, and it went through cause the people entering the data never bother to call the office and check. Next year he just straight up forged the entire transcript to cover the rest of his electives, and it went through as well. Ended up saving money, and boosting his GPA.
In principle yes. But it's extremely rare that 18-23 year olds will voluntarily grind through even the tough bits of that curriculum. Autodidacts often have gaping holes of knowledge in the non-fun stuff. Some hypermotivated people will chew their way through it through sheer self-motivation but the vast majority doesn't have the iron will to do that without external pressure. Even top athletes go to training camps and have trainers who push them.
One can of course argue that the material is irrelevant to actual jobs, and it's an eternal debate whether universities should teach fundamental thinking tools and "theory" or just job skills and web frameworks and git commands.
Getting a degree is about several things:
- It shows you passed admissions (in case that's hard) - It shows you persisted in your studies and managed to pass exams with certain grades - It shows you have acquired certain foundational knowledge
The first two show your ability to learn new things. Even if (and that's just an if) what you learned wasn't directly useful, you show that you can learn, i.e. have some personal qualities like intelligence, conscientiousness, agreeableness. That you're organized enough, don't give up too easily, can work under an authority etc. Many commenters here take these things for granted, but there are many job applicants who are not like you or your friends in these regards and having passed through those filters prepared by colleges is a very meaningful signal to employers.
And the foundational knowledge of math and algorithms is in fact also very useful for any non-code-monkey stuff. You learn a terminology, a vocabulary to talk to colleagues. Yes, you'll learn most things on the job, but it still makes a difference.
And then there's networking as well. Later in life, a recommendation can be very useful for getting a job. Lots of jobs never get publicly advertised because the signal-to-noise ratio is much better if people first search among acquaintances and contacts.
So a college education gives: foundational knowledge, demonstrable evidence of personal qualities, external push and motivation for developing yourself, a personal network.
Homework, since you can get a lot or even full credit even if you get it wrong (haven't learned the material well), provides a big boost to the grades of a type of student who "tests poorly" -- whether because they failed to learn the material, or because of anxiety or whatever.
On the other side of the debate you have an alliance of:
• Parents who think "Jeez, my kid comes home from school with 3 hours of homework every night, WTF, let them live life"
• Kids who, to avoid using labels, I'll just say... they learn the material easily AND can prove it easily on a test. They say "WHY TF are you wasting hours of my time doing busywork??
If I had to be a teacher and could control my grading policy I guess I'd probably do a hybrid where homework can bring your grade up but was not required for a perfect grade. So,
GRADE = MAXIMUM(HW_GRADE * .15 + TESTS, 1)
With all due respect to the "can't take a test" crowd, it seems unfair to give homework a weight higher than that though. Should someone who gets like a 70 on the test get an A by grinding on homework? I'm glad I'm not a teacher so I don't have to actually debate anyone on that.
A biochemistry unit at a Uni in Australia I took in ~2010 operated this way, which was quite surprising to me. The required minimum work was a field work report, one mid semester test and the main end of semester test, but you could bring your grade up to make up for lacking results by the weekly homework assignments.
I didn't do the assignments, but still got a nearly perfect grade, which suited me great (I was doing a double degree and had overloaded on units that semester, so being able to skip weekly homework assignments and just study the textbooks for the exams was super useful)
At some point down the road, he explicitly reminded us that every task was showing an associated point value, and rather than going down in listed order or spending hours on 1-pointers, we should prioritize the best scores according to our skills and competence.
With the entire list before us, we could work at a steady pace without sweating over busywork. And he encouraged us to watch videos and explore the interesting parts.
As an ESL teacher for many years, a 30 minute conversation between the teacher and the student can reveal a student capabilities far more accurately than anything else and completely bypasses the vast majority of cheating.
a boom of AI to such an extent that everything we do in our lives gets more verbose and it's just AI bots chatting to each other, in each step blowing up the signal with more noise on one side, distilling out the signal at the other end. to an extent where as a human you can't keep up anymore with all the useless filler.
can we just leapfrog (or backtrack) to API's talking to each other please?
Painfully tedious youtubeisms in that video. The way it is presented I couldn't help but wonder "this isn't how someone who does that thing would tell me they did that thing...".
:D
I am totally not criticizing or invalidating your impression of it. But the way information is presented has always fascinated me. Doing it better helps everyone. Would you mind telling me what your version of it would look like?
The unending barrage of memes, the animations, floating emojis, the music constantly changing pace, the bright colors, "Youtube-voice", etc. etc.
Compare it with Ben Eater building a video card: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7rce6IQDWs (of course the level of detail is higher but just focus on the style, voice, lack of animations and memes. He cracks a joke here and there, but isn't full of Youtubeisms.) And yes, it's a different genre. And yes, some people hate the genre that youtube is filled with these days.
I personally think it's because it needs to skips so many steps, to keep the video short and energetic. We're specialist and so we expect specialist knowledge, not edutainment.
Youtube though almost requires it.
If the video becomes boring at any point, the average watch duration plummets and Googles algorithm nukes it from orbit
I did this cheat way back. It helps but you’re still required to show work on tests so this just verified all my answers. Be sure to clear screen if teacher walks by.
Also interesting that I almost never see any overlap between the Z80 TIs and the greater retrocomputing community. Probably because most retrocomputing enthusiasts are too old to ever have used one. The 82/83 is definitely old enough to qualify as a retrocomputer in it's own right.
There's even a smartphone (iOS & Android) app to give it a try, but the magic of a calculator comes with tactile buttons.
If the 84+ was $40 by now I would feel differently, but I think TI could have at least built something like the Numworks (with things like real fraction notation easier menus, and a lighted color screen) if they wanted to continue charging the same price now as they did 25 years ago for what was then a pretty respectable piece of tech for its time. Instead they did that innovation but only on calculators too overpowered to be allowed on tests, and left that market with a stagnant TI-8x series.
Oh boy :) you're gonna like this:
https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/419/41990.htm...
Likely.
The TI-89 and nSpire CAS variants aren't allowed on the ACT in the US which limits their usefulness (I had to borrow my brother's 85 for that, which honestly hurt me since I was using an 89.)
> The nSpire was powerful enough to have hacks for it to run full Gameboy games. Many minutes were spent playing Tetris after an exam.
The TI-89 is a bit of a beast in it's own right. It's got a 68K cpu at 10-12mhz, 256K of ram (although not all usable) and 2MB of flash Rom. Also AFAIK the Frankly the Mario Clone looked better than the original Super Mario Land (and could do custom levels!) Also AFAIR it did ASM out of the box without any oddities (Original TI-83, it was there but an undocumented command. 83+ is I think when asm() became the standard.)
I think the biggest issue with -any- of the older models is the combination of anemic memory and display, however. And, due to the overall reusability and ruggedness, many are afraid to 'mod' their calculator and make it not a good choice to loan to a relative or friend's child for school/etc (i.e. even if unmodded, if it looks like it -was- modded, probably can't use on standardized tests)
The absolute best one you can get right now would probably be a nspire CX CAS ii but I doubt you'd be able to use it in an exam. Even in university, symbolic calculators are typically not allowed in math classes because it's basically like having full access to Wolfram Alpha or Mathematica.
When I was in high school (1996-2000), most had a TI-83, with some having a TI-85. I got a TI-89 since it was the best calculator that could be used on the SAT. Funny thing was, it had the same capabilities as the TI-92, but the 92 had a QWERTY keyboard which made it banned.
To answer OP though, I think the reason the 84+ (which is or just emulates the old Z80 goodness of the 82/83/83+) is still wildly popular* is that more advanced calculators can easily do a LOT of stuff for you -- right out of the box -- that you're ostensibly there to learn to do yourself, which brings into serious question why bother taking the class in the first place. So teachers would prefer kids to bring a less overpowered calculator to class.
An 89 is basically to say, Calculus AB as a standard 4-function calculator is to 3rd grade math.
None of that is a knock on any of those calculators, though. It's incredible what they can do!
* Let's all take a moment to appreciate the genius of TI repackaging the same 1970s technology in a shiny new case every few years and getting away with -- STILL to this day -- selling them for $150!
It’s difficult to be an effective teacher, and that’s without even considering the social and economic pressures they face.
The standard education system is incredible for raising the baseline level of knowledge of everyone in a society. I can talk about concepts like "atoms" or "bacteria" or "black holes" with anyone, and they'll know what they are - even if their knowledge of those subjects isn't in depth. Things that 100 years ago would've been cutting edge research, are base education today that virtually the entire population has studied.
That comes from schooling, and it's so important to commit to memory. Without that background knowledge, your understanding of everything around you will be limited in ways you won't even be aware of.
I'm not convinced this is an unalloyed good. Knowing that a disease is caused by "bacteria" instead of "demons" isn't really helpful if you don't have a deep understanding of exactly what bacteria is. See, for example, all of the people who want antibiotics whenever they're sick for any reason. We've just replaced one set of weird beliefs in the general populace with another and given it a veneer of science.
There are functionally illiterate people too in modern day and the average reading level is still elementary school level, but that's vastly better than before when the average person couldn't read at all.
This is a poor example. Even an incomplete image of the germ theory of disease is a massive improvement over thinking illness is caused by demons. An extremely superficial understanding of bacteria as "microscopic organisms which can make you sick" gives good justification why people should do things like wash their hands, cover their mouth when coughing, and not lick the railing on a subway.
Further, the presence of people misunderstanding something that most of the population knows pretty well in no way makes teaching that subject to the population bad. Your assertion would require that believing demons cause sickness actually has benefits we've lost.
Why? Are K-12 keeping on with remote classes now in the USA?
> not to mention smartphone access prevalently available
Also why? Has there been a change in policy about bag and equipment checks?
After COVID many school districts in the US that weren't offering online only school are now. Suddenly they had the capacity to do it as it was forced on them with COVID, so maintain it for students who want it is as easy as anything else.
It makes it hard for them to adjust fast.
The purpose built school from home programs are often far better run / budgeted IT wise. I was at my son's high school and the school from home kids were there for an in person day borrowing the lab for some in person time / activities and etc.
If there's enough of such students in a district's boundaries, I think it makes sense to accomidate them within the district, rather than push them out. It will allow easier movement to/from a classroom setting, and feels more likely to provide continuity than a 3rd party offering. Then again, school districts cut things all the time.
They both sit together, they chat, answer questions and so on and the teacher gets a feel for "does this student have sufficient knowledge".
Frankly I think it would give teachers way better feel for such things than traditional testing does.
Granted, it would be time intensive, but I also suspect improved.
If you could solve this problem well, you could also probably fix the issues with most interview processes.
When I saw my own little brother next holiday, he confirmed that his entire physics class had utilized my problem solvers, and most had also played my TI-83+ version of Blackjack.
...memories
This brought back the awkward memory of explaining why I had so many routines that started with "BJ" in my calculator.
Some other students had complained, but the teacher knew I wrote the app and it required me to understand the math and risk my grades if I was wrong.
One teacher in specific said anyone was welcome to learn to program their calculator as long as they wrote it themselves and no two apps should look the same. I remember giving the teacher my app.
I was surprised and thought I might have to delete the app.
It lets cheaters put chips into calculators and Israeli spies put explosives into pagers. Should large manufacturers be forced to put electronics into the smallest possible casing, to discourage trying to cram anything else inside?
the manufacturers should not be doing anything other than whatever their customers are willing to pay for.
Explosives, or cheats, are unsolvable. People, including exam conductors, will have to either spend the time (and cost) to weed out cheat devices, or accept some level of cheating exists.
What do you think happened, they refabricated the chips on a smaller process to make room for explosives? How do you make extra room on the component level?
My cheat was to write the formula for quadratic equations for a TI 57 with its 50 step programming capacity. I just put in the a, b, and c values then R/S (run/stop) and it'd spit out the answers on a red LED display for the high school algebra test I was taking in 1980 as a freshman.
So better make sure they remove the batteries too. And who knows about the variances in internals they've done to the TI-84 in its 20 years of production.
Students get the reassurance that their TI-84 won't go through a reset.
Schools have extra TI-84s in the back rooms.
Upgraded to an HP 48GX sophomore year of high school. It worked well for math and physics coursework, AP Calculus BC, and the SAT-I math section. The IR serial port's LED was so powerful, there was a learning TV remote app that could control TVs from ~60-100' (20-30m) away. The ability to beam software to other calculators was just shy of the invention of the app store.
At the time though calculators with memory and text were nearly unheard of, so teachers did not even question why there was one on your desk during a french or history exam.
My first program was doubly cheating, not only did I have a program for solving quadratic equation, but I copied the basic off the internet in true open src fashion
When I told my dad I copied code from internet, he was so disappointed and thought I had 0 skills. Now, we pip/npm/etc install anything and are heroes for choosing to "buy" not "build"
In other news, I have the HP 48GX overhead projector accessory I should dust off and recondition. Also have the thermal printer.
Using a calculator took most of the fun out of it for me.
On the other side, I was programming small applications to cheat on my phone.
Latin was a mandatory class in my computer science oriented course of study (I know, completely bonkers) and 3G data was expensive so I wrote some scripts and scraped every possible latin text and translation I could find online and built a J2ME application (horrible platform, but hey, it works) to lookup text.
I still remember my friend getting pinched using the application because he translated an extra phrase which was not in the assignment but was in the source on the internet. Good times