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Comment by burgers | Hacker News Reader

> and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam.

This is the most important part. Cheating is probably the primary reason these are used and not computers/smartphones etc. That is their niche. Test taking. With that, if you change the form factor etc, it becomes more difficult for test administers to recognize etc, and more power allows for programs that can be more "creative" and how they find answers to problems.

The tool is a perfect reflection of being built for a very particular market.

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During college, we used Ti-89 calculators, like the ti-83, but with more ram/rom, higher resolution display etc. It has simple apps such as a notepad and spreadsheet.

Our professor didn't worry about cheating, he just designed the tests while keeping in mind probably every student had written notes on their calculator. In fact, he allowed us to have all our notes and books with us while performing the test, just like you would do in the real world when tackling a difficult problem.

Thereis no reason to write a test that requires a calculator, so the the is no reason to demand a hobbled calculator.

I use to write programs in HS for these things that helped me during math tests.

Chances are, if you were able to program the algorithms required to solve the problems, you understood them well enough or more than enough to pass the course.

Yes but you can copy a program more easily than you can "copy" the knowledge behind it.

What happens when one kid writes a quadratic solver and gives it to half the class?

Definitely not the case for me. I had as many books and websites as I needed while creating those programs, but did not have them available during tests.

I would occasionally bury stuff in programs that shouldn't have been there. I was afraid that the teacher might look at my programs and if there was a functional program, would realize what I was doing, so I'd usually have a code language that I could easily decipher but wouldn't be easily figured out by someone else.

I probably gave my teachers too much credit, but the classes that could use calculators were usually taught by teachers who knew about programming the things.

I am a developer today because I used to write little programs that helped me cheat in high school and college.

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