I love that this thread basically turned into Show Us Your HP-48. I would show off mine too, but the power button died on it, sadly, and I haven’t had the time to take it apart and clean it. Working or not, I will be buried with it. It was Peak Calculator, as far as I’m concerned and any who disagree can
Push My
Push Lawn
Get Off
When I designed my statistics course, I simply made content that welcomed students to look things up and made questions more about the challenge of finding the right methods to solve a problem using actual Python. I just thought that made more sense than forcing them to buy useless gadgets and using surveilance software to make sure they are punished for not memorizing formulas.
I am guessing that graphing calculators were not widely available when I took the SAT – we had to have scientific calculators for high school – but I don’t remember even having a calculator (of any type) when I took the SAT. In hindsight it doesn’t seem possible to have taken the test without it (at least, not in the allotted time), but I can’t imagine them letting everyone just walk in with whatever they happened to own. Why, someone might’ve cribbed formulae in the instruction manual, which might have conveniently tucked into the protective case! (Like someone taking Chemistry might do with a Casio fx, for example! Just imagine!)
However, the day I took the SAT is the same day I realized I had measles, and that’s my lasting memory of that day…
When my wife took a Statistics course, they didn’t really explain (so far as I could tell) what they were trying to do. It was just instructions on what to punch into the TI-85 or whatever it was. My wife had had the temerity to use some other calculator, so the instructions made no sense. I think she ended up dropping the class and taking it elsewhere.
I took a statistics course at a community college decades after I graduated college. I was the only one in the class who used the iOS TI emulator app; all the other kids in the class already had the hardware TI calculator from high school. And yes the whole course was about which buttons to press on the TI. Very disturbing.
The education business seems to be one of the last truely noncompetitive industries left in this country. Thomson has such a sweet business with lots of laws literally forcing their books to be used. Almost as bad as Dolby.
I worked at a middle school where they offered a course in How To Use This Crappy Software. The entire course was built around how to use this particular tool to draw in three dimensions on a computer. AFAIK the software is not used in any higher level courses, or at all, outside of the classroom. It was like a middle-school CAD program. I imagine the main reason it was used is because it was cheap per seat and introduced kids to drafting on screen.
One professional review calls it a “sexy beast”
Presumably, a “sexy graphing calculator” costume will be popular this Halloween. If it wasn’t already.
I am guessing that graphing calculators were not widely available when I took the SAT – we had to have scientific calculators for high school
I mean in the sense that the market for these calculators is to take exams. I’m perfectly happy doing my calculations and running scripts on my computer, but I cannot bring a laptop to an exam.
As for the scientific/graphing calculator… My first “big boy” device was an HP 48G so for me graphing and scientific are synonims (I know they’re not but I personally use them indistinctly). I don’t think you can buy scientific calculators without graphing capabilities these days.
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